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I picked up my new glasses yesterday! Pretty cool! Actually they're quite similar to my old glasses, a little heavier, and a little smaller. A little more "contemporary" I guess you could say. School starts up again in exactly one week, which is sad but is also probably for the best. None of my plans for this break have panned out. I guess deep down I never expected to actually sit down and watch the entire first season of Twin Peaks in one day, so who can complain. I did finish the damn Star Wars book I was reading (yeah, you heard right, check out the books section for a sorta-review!) and started on my pile of Christmas books. I'm reading The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide now, which is far less sensationalistic than I thought it would be and much more to the heart of the matter, trying to figure out how so many people were capable of such horrible things. Basically it's like reading a PBS documentary as opposed to the Friday night Dateline special I was expecting it to be. This is probably a good thing in the long run, but drastically slows down my already-slow reading pace! It's heavy and abstract, and yet I have a difficult time putting it down! I still have to write my thank-you letters for Christmas, but am a little hesitant to see what happens. No more than two years ago, my Christmas thank-you letters probably averaged about 1/3 of a page (I don't use the word "page" arbitrarily! I use a word/page counter on the internet!). However, there has been a noticeable change in the amount of text I produce in one sitting after having started this website. Last year, my thank-you letter was four pages long, and there was all sorts of stuff in that letter I probably should have kept to myself. I've noticed that the size of my journal entries here have been steadily increasing over time, so who knows what's going to happen. It's gonna be horrible!
So, as it stands, my Christmas break has degenerated into my waking up at around noon, taking vitamins, eating a banana, and going to Oprah.com to see what today's show is about. I figure if I'm going to take part in questionable behavior, I might as well be pro-active about it. Indeed, I intend to watch every episode of Oprah that comes my way until school starts again, but I check her website to see if a celebrity will be on the show on any given day. I've seen beetles floating on water that were more emotional than celebrity-oriented Oprah shows. But make no mistake, between commercial breaks I do compensate for things with the ear-drum desecrating hyper-needles encapsulating high-volume, high-intensity bursts of Unheilig, Eisbrecher and Das Ich. In the end that might be all I have left!
I did manage to surprise myself over the course of this break. I haven't had the desire to play video games in a long time. Actually that part hasn't changed, but I noticed if I do manage to psyche myself up far enough to turn on the Xbox and play a game for an hour, I can to stick to that atmosphere like a carefully crafted Post-It for as long as I'm willing to remain. Case in point, Deus Ex: Invisible War. I beat the original Deus Ex for PC long ago. It was a pretty fun game, but it wasn't until after I beat it that I realized how great it was. I was afraid the same was true for DE:IW. The graphics are great, the frame-rate is ass, but it all seems to work together reasonably well. And if their aim was to confuse me with the story, they accomplished this goal twice over. Anyway, I'm about twelve hours into the game. I started it during the first two weeks of last semester, but last semester made it painfully clear that video games would not be happening again until Christmas break. The first seven hours were pretty dull. But then I discovered the joy of biomod canisters! All my biomods are maxed out now! I can hack ATMs, soda machines, vending machines, and security terminals! I can employ "thermal masking" to hide from robots! I can regenerate my health, but also shoot a strangely colored orb out of my solar plexus to float around rooms, speak declarations of intentions in a vocoded Brian Dennehy type voice, and process corpses and unconscious organic organisms alike to refreshen my vitality. And if that weren't enough, I can also throw bodies the length of large gymnasiums, admiring their ragdoll physics and real-time shadows in a 15fps emulation of Thursday morning slumber-deprivation. I can also now kill penguins with basketballs, but I don't need a game to do that, so there was really no point in mentioning it.
I was in Anchorage over Christmas visiting my brother and his fiancee with my family. That was pretty uneventful. The night we got there, everyone celebrated the unparalleled joys of Texas Hold'em poker and decided that the ultimate hoot of hoots would be to gather together around a flat piece of wood and play! I sat on the couch and watched some show about engineering bridges while this nonsense played out. After about two hours of Texas Hold'em, everyone decided to watch a movie. The movie Rounders. A movie about Texas Hold'em. After the movie was over, everyone gathered around the table again to eat-- wait, no, they gathered around to play Texas Hold'em and guerrilla-ingest processed pig-heart cylinders thick as PVC pipe and square cracker representations of brittle shredded-wheat quilted couch cushions (code-named Triscuits). Somewhere along the way I fell asleep on the couch, my bed for the night. I woke up the next day at 4:00am and discovered that Anchorage's cable service has a little channel by the name of GaS. Up until this point, I had my reservations in believing such a heavenly channel could possibly exist. One night, Ian, Drew and I had a heated debate over whether there were two video game shows to grace the broadcastings of Nickelodeon, or if there had been only one. I knew there had been at least two, but no one would believe me until we discovered the GaS website. GaS has Nick Arcade listed in its routine scheduling. Indeed, there were now two shows that each of us could recall: Nick Arcade and Video Power, but I haven't been able to find out for sure if Video Power was on Nickelodeon (can't imagine where else it would be). Anyway, the point is, GaS is a channel devoted to all the "sports" shows and game shows that have ever been on Nickelodeon. After trying our darndest for four hours, until 6:00am, to get Drew's satellite dish to pick up this mythical GaS channel, we were ultimately defeated, and crushed emotionally from the disappointment. So imagine my surprise when I found this channel staring back at me at 4:00am in my brother's living room. I did what any individual who grew up in the '80s would do, I watched Double Dare, Get The Picture, Legends of the Hidden Temple, Global Guts, and Figure It Out until 10:00am.
Wait, Oprah is on. Okay, back! So then after watching Nick GaS until 10:00am, it was officially Christmas morning. My parents and I had opened our presents back at our house two days before Christmas because it didn't make much sense to bring all that stuff to Anchorage just to unwrap it and bring it back, so official Christmas morning was actually kind of a miniature Christmas. My brother got my dad one of those video game controller things that hooks directly up to a television. Not the Atari or Intellivision ones. Not the Dig Dug / Ms. Pac-Man one. Not even the SpongeBob one. Nope, it was the Texas Hold'em one, shaped like a poker table. And imagine that, my parents got my brother the same thing! Hooray! My mom got my dad a Texas Hold'em t-shirt and hat, my parents got my brother a set of official Texas Hold'em poker chips, and while we were in Anchorage my dad bought some of the same official Texas Hold'em casino clay poker chips that he couldn't find in Fairbanks and also an official Texas Hold'em foldout poker table thing, accept no imitations. I gave my brother two country music CDs I bought from the Top 20 bin at Fred Meyer. My mom gave my brother a casino game for PC, with an emphasis of Texas Hold'em on the cover. The PC sitting in my brother and his fiancee's apartment, which actually belonged to their roommate, was a broken piece of crap which wouldn't recognize the CD drive, much less install the Texas Hold'em casino game, so I sat on the floor and tried to fix it while everyone else played Texas Hold'em and once again ate gargantuan sausage logs named after the sunniest season. As the day progressed, with hours and hours of Texas Hold'em, I fell asleep on the couch in an apathetic sitting position with my head flopped over the back. When I woke up, some of my brother's neighbors had shown up to contribute to the homely Christma-- Texas Hold'em. I awoke with my brother's next-door neighbor, a man I had never met, sitting on the couch next to me drinking a beer. He asked me what my favorite drink was and I told him I don't drink. At that point all four of our eyes fell upon the gift that my brother had gotten me for Christmas, a Miller High Life t-shirt that says "I was born on or before this date in: 1983". He asked me what I do, I told him I'm in college, and then we avoided eye contact for 20min, each trying desperately to come up with a compatible topic of conversation, but ultimately failing with flying colors. I looked around and there were two people I'd never seen before playing Texas Hold'em with my family. Shortly thereafter, two girls showed up at the door, one of which my brother calls his sister. His "sister" works at a porn shop and the girl who was with her was a 5'11", extremely attractive, thin Fairuza Balk knockoff who worked full-time at Hooters, part time at the same porn shop as the other girl, modelled, and was still in high school. Somewhere along the way my brother attached his pregnant fiancee to a towel-rack with his bouncer hand-cuffs and couldn't find the key. I was suffering from the adverse effects of Imodium-AD throughout the duration of Anchorage, fell asleep again while the collective Texas Hold'em spider-vein continued to throb, and woke up at 5:00am this time, early enough to fit in four more hours of GaS and a Science Channel documentary about biological defenses for survival in cold climates. Also, during this trip I found out my brother's baby's name is going to be Xander Axel. When the time comes, I plan to have identical twins. I'm going to name one of them Transparent and the other Translucent and I'm going to make Translucent sit closer to the television throughout the duration of his childhood.
Back in November I realized why people are so adamant about voting. I woke up early on November 2nd (had to set my 300-watt stereo to erupt BlutEngel's Seelenschmerz in my ear at 17/30 volume to ensure my wakefulness), drove on over to my old junior high, the closest place to vote, cast my ballot, was a little sad not to have received an "I voted!" sticker like the last time I voted, drove home, ate, went to school, and continued on as any other day. When I got home at 10:00pm after a brutal serving of the night-abrasion known as Information Assurance, I found a street cone standing up in the snow bank beside where I park my car. I came inside and my dad asked me if I got a cone from somewhere, to which I replied "... No, I was about to ask you the same thing..." I was still in the entry-way of my house and could not see my parents, but I heard them snickering to each other from above. I asked, "What the dilly?", and my dad explained to me that he found a slightly beat-up street cone laying sideways where my car usually sits. I started thinking out loud, "You know, there was some guy setting up street cones near my car when I came back out from voting... and he was looking at me kind of weird as I drove off." I put two and two together and SCORE! I won a street cone!!! Forget the sticker! I just wish I knew how I carried a full-sized street cone half a mile with my car without realizing it was there, and without really messing it up either. At any rate, I was able to acquire a street cone without buying or stealing a street cone. Democracy rules!
Oh yeah, and a few months ago I was at work in a computer lab and decided I wanted to know what Einstein's IQ was. I searched the Google and one of the first results was this thread at FAQs.org. I probably spent about two hours reading that thread laughing profusely. Check it out, maybe you'll laugh too! I mirrored it, not only because it's priceless, but because someone made a post that stretched the page to Hell and back. I hate reading things using the horizontal scroll bar, so that has been fixed. If that's not your cup of tea, then come on over to Wikipedia.org and read about qualia or color blindness! Based on their descriptions of different types of red-green color blindness, I'm certain I'm "protanomaly". And if that stuff bores you, check out this cool analysis of the show Video Power! Complete with an audio clip of the show!
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Hi! Hello there! Christmas is just around the corner! I was out doing a bit of Christmas shopping when I passed by some of those Jones sodas I've heard so much about. Of course, I started thinking about those absurd Thanksgiving flavors they've come out with for the last two Thanksgivings. Turkey & Gravy, Mashed Potato, Green Bean Casserole, etc. Last year, I remember hearing that the CEO of the company can't even stomach these flavors. Yes, he was only stating what we already knew: they're a joke. Now I actually love the idea of making these flavors of soda, but after a moment of thought, something about these flavors, specifically the fact that they sell out nation wide in a matter of days, disturbed me. They represent the decomposition of capitalism. No no, hear me out! I think this may be the first instance of a company making a product that nobody wants, and then having nation-wide difficulties keeping it in stock. That's it, the market-economy is breaking down. Jones Soda has unwittingly found the Achilles heal of capitalism and it's made of carbonated mashed potatoes.
Now, I know what you're thinking, many companies have come close. We're accustomed to being sold things that we are fooled to want, that's an American fact of life. Weird fads come and go, pushing all sorts of meaningless matter into our closets. Like a wound that will never heal, I am ashamed to have taken part in some of them. But this is, as far as I know, the first time in history people have flocked to stores across the country to buy something they don't even want to think about, much less drink. Maybe this is the secret the Soviets have been hiding from us. So, in an effort to explain this conundrum, I'm going to trace the descent of capitalism so that we can all take a good hard look and pinpoint where everything started falling apart. Here we go!
Incense
Back in my junior-high years, this became somewhat of a fad. You couldn't walk through a mall, or in Fairbanks' case, a hallway, without seeing hippy booths pitching incense sticks and burners. My young, impressionable mind was sucked into the gravity of it all and I soon found myself with an incense burner and several packages of incense sticks. In all actuality, though I can easily see my 12-year-old self falling into this trap regardless, I think I bought these things as an excuse to play with fire. In fact, my semi-conservative family accepted this interest in incense without question probably due to the fact that my dad and brother were also persistently looking for excuses to play with fire. So everyone was happy, for a while. After building up a large collection of these sticks, and after the thrill of setting things aflame on a regular basis died down, I discovered a dismaying anomaly in the notion of incense. Musk, Vanilla, Waterfall, Karma Devaya, Patchouli... they all smelled like fucking campfire smoke! Someone out there has created an entire industry out of rolling very thin corn dogs in soot and having a monkey on acid write bullshit with a typewriter. I filled my room with smoke for months and pretended to like it because of that fucking monkey and his majestic capacity to weave words into dreams.
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Bottled Water
Okay, I realize I'm not the first person to question the necessity of bottled water (and certainly not the last), but look at yourselves people! This isn't Mexico! I've actually drank water out of my sink and lived to tell the tale! So did you, before 2000! Shit, so that's what happened. Y2K hit and, thinking it was 1900, the consumerist mainframe that we're all jacked into started flipping out and demanding water in bottles to combat smallpox. Look, I've seen some weird stuff in my water before, but you remember that drink Orbitz? That drink had entire solar systems floating around playing backgammon in it and the FDA passed it on by. I'm not saying there's planets in my water, I like to think of my chunks as power pills. But honestly, when I find my tap-water inadequate, I do what's good and healthy. I drink a nice cold Coca Cola classic. How else will I keep my teeth in such pristine condition? I also make pizzas out of electricity when I can't find a salad. You ever notice on the nutritional facts of bottled water how some of the ingredients cannot be determined, despite the incredible advances in water technology? That's because a little ways up from that Dasani water spring, about fourteen paces north-east from the source, lies my own venture. My arsenic gully. Yep, that's what they don't want you to know. I don't even know what the hell a gully is but it still scares the fudge out of me, and I drink butter wiped on the inside of a Ziploc bag when I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
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Now That's What I Call Music!
It's hard to say when these CDs stopped being merely "compilation albums" and became the chunk of fat in life's can of baked beans, but I think it must have been around the "Now 7" point. I've always seen compilation albums as albums for people who don't know what kind of music they like. Musical elitism (and there's a lot of it these days) aside, this can actually be a pretty good way for people to get into music. However, if you've made it through five compilation albums, much less seventeen of them (yes, there's 17... I picked 16 because the cover looked cooler), and still haven't decided what kind of music you like, maybe you should just stick to watching Will & Grace. When people buy albums these days, they buy them out of respect for the band, knowing full-well they could get them for free off the internet instead. When people buy Now 16, it's because they want to hear what french fries sound like. And what's with all that electric crap flying around in the background? They should put styrofoam peanuts back there to remind you that you're paying $18.98 for the album-equivalent of squeaky packing material that gets stuck to the dog on Christmas morning.
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Those Cat Hat... Things
Long before Hollywood initiated their escapade of soiling Dr. Seuss's good name, a strange Cat in the Hat-hat craze swept the nation (well, it swept Alaska anyway, and seeing as how we get the nation's left-overs, this craze probably happened a year earlier in the other states). I think this happened around 1996-ish. Just like those darn incense, there were Cat in the Hat-style hats all over the place. Some of them were red and white, some black and white, some colored so exotically in luscious blues, perhaps purples, greens, and yellows, that they looked like an infected elephant genitalia... though I would advise that you keep reading before you start to dwell on that. I just made that mistake. Anywho, I actually kinda liked those things (the hats). The thing that irked me was, if these things were selling so well, where the hell were they going? People were buying these hats and not wearing them! For shame! I would have loved to see a school hallway full of teenagers wearing these things in an assortment of colors. It would have been like an infected elephant genitalia Ku Klux Klan, but full of love rather than hate (especially the purple ones). Actually, come to think of it, there was one kid I knew who actually wore his cat hat regularly, not just on Halloween. And that guy was the coolest motherfucker this side of Motown. If you still have one of these hats lying around, I suggest you fill it with pears and strike yourself in the face with it.
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DVDs
Say what you will, I still think DVDs are a fad. Though, a fad that's been going on so long we'll never be able to recover! Yes, DVDs do have their merits. They have higher quality audio and video and also often have extras. Even though I don't care all that much about quality, the extras can be pretty cool. But there is a very limited selection of movies I really want to see more of, especially when the extras have been scraped off the cutting room floor. But really, it goes deeper than that. It's this process of moving every movie ever made to DVD that really twists my nipples (in a bad way). Long ago, when DVDs first entered the U.S. market and I started seeing older movies popping up on shelves in this new format, I thought to myself "They aren't actually going to release every movie ever made to DVD are they?" Not knowing who to ask, I decided if one (and only one) condition were met, I would consider DVDs the New Coke of the film industry. And that condition was if "It's Pat" made it to DVD. Sure enough, I found this movie sitting on a shelf years later. I picked it up just to make sure I could find the DVD symbol on it, thinking maybe it was just a huge slab of beef jerky packaged in a DVD jewel case as a joke. Yep, DVD. This means two things of course. First, the people responsible for this movie received an influx of royalty checks. Second, and worse yet, these same people received an influx of encouragement. If an "It's Pat 2" makes it into theaters, rest assured, I will be sitting in the back row huffing Glade air fresheners and screaming, just because I need to.
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Pogs
You knew pogs had to show up here. Pogs were a craze probably around 1995. What you did was buy all these circular pieces of cardboard and then, well... then you regretted it. Of all the products in the world, pogs come the closest to justifying a demand for the pet rock. Like trading cards, one could actually blow a sizable chunk of change on pogs back in the day. That bucket of pogs you see to your right was enough currency to buy a small cabin back in 1995. Poggers (from here on out known as "Biscuit Inflators") would load up on circular pieces of cardboard, put them in a pile, and then throw shit at them. For a small time, there was actually a certain amount of order to this game, back when the "slammers" were made of plastic. Then metal slammers made it to the scene, with the same dimensions as their plastic counterparts at first, then becoming girthier by the week. I saw slammers that wouldn't have been allowed on airplanes. Cylindrical chunks of copper an inch thick with holograms of King Kong on them. Soon enough, kids were just throwing random chunks of metal they found at the dump at the floor, running around like maniacs with their cardboard bounty in one fist like a crack fiend on his last leg. Then, all at once, everyone came to their senses and there is now a pog landfill the size of a small country, named Pogtopia, somewhere on an island off the coast of Chile. But what if this fad continued till this day? Can you imagine? Don't click on this if you're at school or work.
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Grow your own fresh herbs!
I don't know if this is a fad yet, I don't keep up on such things, but if it's not, it soon will be. I keep seeing advertisements for this Chia herb kit or whatever they call it. It comes with Chia soil spongy things, pots, and seeds. You just moisten the sponge, put it in the pot, put the seeds on top, and in no time (and with little effort) you'll have fresh herbs growing in your kitchen! You can even transplant them into your garden! You'll be able to enjoy every meal with that extra flavor that comes only with fresh herbs. Listen up, herb people. This thing to the left, it's a burrito. Join America and eat your fucking burrito.
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Testicle-Compromising Music
You know, there was a time, at least I think there was a time, when people listened to music for a reason. That reason was to escape from their life for an hour or two a day (or all day). After they came home from a long, hard day of work or school, they could blast the speakers or headphones with whatever deep, dark, and/or angry vocals they needed to make life a little more bearable, at least for a moment. There must have been some incredible paradigm shift that occurred while I wasn't paying attention, because now everyone wants to spend their two hours pretending they're the person whose ass they just kicked. Good Charlotte, Simple Plan, Blink 182, Sum 41... and more! What... who... I mean, where do these bands come from! And why have I heard of them! Get it straight Good Charlotte, you dress in black because you hate people! Because you hate people and you know the only way to get better is to hate them even more! Wear a Baywatch t-shirt if you hate yourself! And for the love of God quit whining in that tone that makes my testicles want to shatter. Any time I turn MTV on at the wrong moment it's like my scrotum is a satchel charge and you've got your finger on the button. Look, do you see the seriousness of this?
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Jones's Thanksgiving Soda
 And here we are, finally to the Jones soda. To tell you the truth I kind of forgot what the purpose of everything leading up to this point was. But look at this crap! The flavors are Mashed Potato, Turkey & Gravy, Fruitcake, Cranberry, Green Bean Casserole. It's like God bottled up the flavors of Heaven and sent them down to Earth, but then they got lost and five new soda flavors came shooting out the ass of a turkey. I suppose I'm as guilty as anyone, I would buy all five of these flavors if given the chance. If you heard that noise, that was the sound of the planet starting to crumble. Jones Soda has done it, they have kick-started the demise of the human race, all it took was a bottle full of bubbly green beans and a little heart. In the year 2028, a small child hiding in a fallout shelter with his family is going to be forced to drink Turkey & Gravy soda because his parents chose to purchase it with money that could have been invested in Mountain Dew. Yep, you might as well buy twelve fluid ounces of kicking a small child in the head. May God have mercy on our souls.
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Ho Ho Ho! It is now officially Christmas break in the good old Fairbanks of Alaska. I ended this horrible, horrible semester in a fireball of glory. By cause of some bad planning and my inability to stay awake while at my place of residence, I took my last two finals (really my only two finals, the first two were take-homes) after being awake for approximately 20.0 hours and 23.0 hours. These finals were Physics and Linear Algebra; this was not an upbeat day. I told the guys at work that I will be taking all of Christmas break off in order to hibernate and recover from this downright nasty semester, so I now have what is technically known as an "assload" of free time. It's coo. My parents and I are flying down to Anchorage for a few days, including Christmas, to visit my brother. So, rest assured, this is gonna be one of the weirder Christmases. I wonder if my brother will manage to light the lawn on fire while blasting Rammstein and twirling a stick like he did last time I saw him, during the summer. I wouldn't put it behind him, he's lit snow on fire more than once in the past. Those truly were the years of wonder.
 Meet the Information Assurance lab, the #1 culprit in turning this semester into a living, breathing entity of suck. This was supposed to be some form of "hacking" class. The posters promised "wargames" between groups. I signed up thinking this was my ticket to some street cred, but as the semester progressed, I realized what I had signed up for. When I registered for this class I was really just enlisting to have someone smear a turd across my schedule like a crayon (only those Crayola 96-color crayon sets have this particular type of crayon). We didn't do a thing in this class aside from hours upon hours of busy work, much of which had to be done in this lab. This lab is isolated, both in spirit and connectivity. It is not allowed to be connected to the internet because of all the horrible, malicious things that we don't do in it. One day, after an FBI agent came into our class to show off a loaded pistol and an MP5, I had to go up to this lab to to complete a checklist of network configuration requirements in a virtual clusterfuck of computers known as VMWare and ended up being there till 2:30am. And even without all the negative associations, this lab was the most depressing place in the world. You always happen to be the only person in there, the windows are always kept open at least three inches regardless of what God-forsaken temperature happens to be infecting the air, there's a gigantic switch with blinky lights but somehow these blinky lights fail to be fun this time around, the room is about the size of two coffins placed side-to-side, the door has this heavy-duty combination lock to seal you off from the outside world, there's no internet so there's no escape, and the whole time you're sitting there it's like something's pushing its thumb against your left eye while you try to battle through five hours of fluff work in a more reasonable amount of time (but fail). Once you've completely broken down, you realize this class is an elective that you didn't have to take... and well, that's it. This is really all I want for Christmas, never to set foot in this room again. Thanks to Darren for bringing in his camera to take this picture of depression.
So for Christmas, I asked for (well, actually I ordered my presents from Amazon.com myself, no sense in having a man in the middle) ... more books! I've been trying to stop contributing to this large pile of books already in queue, but this is Christmas, the season of gluttony! I should know, I just ate a plate full of fried wontons with several glasses of egg nog to wash them down. Time and time again I realize egg nog was never meant to be a "wash things down" kind of fluid, and then forget again next year. Washing things down with egg nog almost feels like washing things down with meatloaf. So I figure there's no harm in stockpiling books I suppose, I'll just call it "supporting the industry". Plus I'm really getting into non-fiction and am lacking such books. So here's what I'm getting!
And now, just because I want to, I'm going to talk about video games some more.
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES)
 Look at that screenshot, doesn't it just give you the shivers! The first Ninja Turtles game for the NES was certainly a questionable affair. I bet half the kids who bought this game did so after playing the radical arcade game, thinking they were getting the same thing or at least something similar. No, they were buying frustration coiled tightly inside a gray plastic square. Your first clue that this was not a wise investment was that everything in this game flickered. It brought the NES to its knees, filling up the screen with all sorts of useless shit colored some type of murky pigment. Really, the aura of this game is impossible to communicate without an analogy. Every time I played this game I had a vision of someone pissing on a sheet of plastic wrap framed in brown clay. And that vision has stuck. Thinking back on it, what's strange is how they managed to break this game into essentially several different games, ranging from Not Fun to Holy Crap. Did you beat this game? Did anyone you know beat this game? No? That's because it has been scientifically proven, this is the one truly unbeatable game. I forget what order it all flowed in, but in the first level you slice some stuff up in the sewers and some buildings, then I think you have to defuse these ungodly bombs scattered throughout the aquatic, and then you get a van and somewhere along the way everything just falls apart. I got past the stage with the van once before, and when I found what was on the other side, I never wanted to see it again. The farthest I ever got in this game placed me in a strange unknown territory, certainly nothing from the cartoon, where progress required me to dunk down in sporadic manholes to pass underneath chain-link fences. Inside these manholes were the most violent scenes of brutality ever depicted in media. Each manhole led the player into a room of catastrophic energy. The person who designed these rooms actually just drew a square on a piece of paper and then started pouring his home-made colored-paste and staple trail mix down his throat until the next underground facility was vomited out in successive degrees of red. Once the mixture coagulated, it was digitized for consumption. You think I'm making this up, but I met the guy. He's been on life support ever since. I checked GameFAQs and there is actually a walkthrough for this game, meaning someone actually claims to have beaten it. I consider this a work of fiction. I can make stuff up too.
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Raiden II
 Here we have Raiden II. It was an arcade game, it was also doubled up with the original Raiden in the first Playstation game I ever owned, Raiden Project (which was on clearance for $20 when I bought it and is now worth $30, go figure). In Raiden II, the world learned the meaning of the word "balance" through use of a counter-example. The original Raiden is a pretty difficult game. This is how these top-down airplane shooters were meant to be. The first level is always pretty easy, throwing a minimum number of foes at you as to give you time to experiment with whatever weapon power-ups are to be found in the game. Then by level four these games are quarter kleptos. In Raiden, we were given the Red and Blue weapons. Each weapon had eight levels of power-up before it maxed out. Red shot red bullets, Blue shot space-aged blue lasers. In Raiden II, they introduced the Purple weapon, the cocaine-snorting half-cousin of the still-present Red and Blue. Purple was different, it latched onto enemies and whipped around in strange convulsive movements, making it maneuverable so you could bend the purple arch this way and that, destroying any enemy to come at you while you were still latched onto the strongest foe on the screen. What I just described is level 1 of the Purple weapon. Once you manage to power-up to the 8th level of Purple (it won't take you long), this girthy electrical belt twists and turns and flips all over the place, going nine different directions at once, buzzing like a tweaked out bumble bee half-dissolved in acid, munching on a transistor, making your television shoot out ultraviolet rays so that you'll sober from your Raiden II-induced seizure with your pupils encrusted with burnt tears. And after all of this nonsense, the game is over, you've won. Yes, and since the purple in this game looked exactly like the blue, in exactly the same shade, this made the game twice as strange. It became a game of careful timing and bewilderment, lest I turn my 8th-level purple ass-whoopin' beam into an impotent red sea-sponge projectile.
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Command & Conquer
 Command & Conquer is one of the best games ever made, the game that defined the real-time strategy genre (even though Herzog Zwei and Dune II came before it). I really loved this game. I got it for Christmas in '95 and played it the entire Christmas break. Who can forget those classic songs that played during combat! Imaoamam iMoamam Imaoakmechanical man... or something like that. I never beat this game, I probably got about a third or half of the way through the GDI campaign, and then I got to the mission where you control a lone commando with bombs to blow up SAM sites. I could never get away in time. I always died on the first SAM site when I couldn't, for the life of me, get away from the bomb before it blew me up. I never figured it out. Then one evil day, some dude in my 7th grade home-room (I remember home-room vividly because I had Mr. Locken, the teacher who had an open aquarium full of maggots he called the "Bug Box" and accepted heads of roadkill to put into it. Stranger yet is that it always smelled like french fries in his class) was reading a PC Gamer magazine and I overheard him reading about cheat patches for Command & Conquer. Immediately upon returning home, I searched Infoseek for these patches, was amazed when I found them (the internet was kind of primitive back then), downloaded them, and messed around with them. There were two patches in particular that I loved. One of them allowed you to change the weapon of any unit in the game to any other unit's weapon. The other patch, Instant Build, allowed you to build things instantly and for free. The strange part about Instant Build was that it also gave this instant build ability to the CPU opponent, which was never more apparent than when you destroyed his harvester. With Instant Build on, when you destroyed the CPU's harvester, about a minute later you'd see about 40 more harvesters piled up on top of one another to replace the single harvester that was destroyed. This was when I realized real-time strategy games are more fun when you cheat. I gave all my infantry laser beams that were originally intended for large defensive obelisks, made my tanks shoot air strikes, made my power plants throw grenades, and I'd just head on over to the CPU's end of the map and destroy what harvesters he had until there was a giant metal ant-colony cluttered all over the map. That's strange, I just described the dreams I have after eating a Heart Attack Pan at Denny's.
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Last night I watched All Dogs Go To Heaven. I did it! I decided to start off my Christmas break with a challenge, and man does that movie make me uncomfortable. Every last terrifying moment I remembered was there in all its glory. Also, while rooting through my closet to find this video, I found The Last Unicorn, another movie loaded with 90 minutes of disturbance. So, I imagine before this break is over I will end up... wait a second... what the hell... Lester?! That sneaky son of a bitch! It's all starting to make sense now! I've gotta call Harry!
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I just got back from a place called Matrix Jewelers. About five days ago, I was sitting right here at this very computer doing Software Engineering homework when something on my face exploded. It happened to be towards the right side of my head, and after several moments of reflection, I deduced that this explosion came from one of two suspect sources. Either (a) the retina in my right eyeball finally combusted, or (b) something in, on, or around my glasses just failed in a spectacular way. I was leaning toward suspect (a), because during my reflection on the matter, I remembered that my vision twitched or at least deformed for a small instant synchronously with my eccentric face percussion. However, upon further thought, I realized that this vision twitch could just as well be attributed to a sudden unexpected movement from my glasses. I knew there was only one way to be sure what exactly happened, that was to take off my glasses and examine them. Sure enough, my glasses were to blame, but there was still no telling exactly what happened. In fact, that is still a mystery to this day. The right side, or right "arm" on my glasses was no longer pushing back against my head like it used to. Not only that, but I could now simply pull that arm out of my frames without even giving it conscious thought, yet the screw remained, with a puzzling smirk forged of its flat-head wedge. Everything still appeared to be where it should be, so I had/have no idea what precisely did this to me!
I communicated this foul turn of events to my parents. My dad said the screw must have been stripped, that something similar happened to his glasses, and that after checking around town, Matrix Jewelers was one of the few places which had the tools to fix this particular type of problem. He remembered the cost being $15 to have his glasses repaired. I probably don't belong anywhere near a jewelry store, surely would not feel comfortable in a jewelry store, and did not want to go to a jewelry store, but this became my personal mission. After several days of late classes and dayfuls of homework, I finally had the opportunity to stop by Matrix Jewelers today. I thought about buying shades and a black wool trench coat to wear as I walked inside, but practical concerns kept me grounded. Up until today I had been keeping my glasses together near the hinge with electrical tape, it was discrete and almost looked like part of the glasses (although, straying from the location(s) on the glasses where anything useful ought to be). The tape worked pretty well but I still had the problem of the right arm not pushing against my face, so my glasses sat more lopsided than usual, painting my face with the picture of a man who'd just been pummeled by physics problems. There's this one problem in my physics book that tells you that you're an arctic explorer trying to determine the weight of an unconscious polar bear by tugging on it with a rope. Don't believe me?
I had debated whether to stop by the jewelry store during rush hour traffic. The store happens to be in a weird location alongside an extremely busy rush-hour road, and the roads have been horrible lately. For my mission, I knew I must overcome this driving phobia once again and brave the early-evening traffic! This was done! I took $30 with me just in case the price had gone up and headed on over. Matrix Jewelers is just sort of a stand-alone shack sitting in the middle of nowhere behind a hardware store, as if it were the last jewelry store picked for kickball. I stepped inside, it looked a lot more elegant in there than I was expecting, which immediately threw me off guard. Two pairs of eyes peered out at me through a small doorway leading to some type of makeshift office, two women. Eventually, a young woman crawled out from the room and asked me if I needed any help. I explained to her that my glasses' suicide attempt had failed, that the retina in my right eye had not exploded, and that I had to talk myself down for 25 minutes not to walk into the store with a trench coat on. She looked like she had no idea what was going on. She looked like I was the only person who's ever gone into a jewelry store to get their glasses fixed. And I didn't blame her, this didn't make any sense to me either! She walked in a confused daze back into the cave, which apparently led to an even darker alcove, an even bleaker sector of the jewelry racket. I was not able to see inside of this postmortem twin of the dual-edged twinkle chasm, but surely noticed a cold glow emanating from the invisible room, assaulting the carpet of its neighboring room with dreary vibrations. I never once caught a glimpse of who or what was in that room, but I heard its voice. I believed it to be The Architect.
After picking up on faint murmurs filled to the brim with muffled, nervous banter from two rooms away for several minutes, the woman came back out and said my glasses are very unique and that The Architect does not know if he can fix them. She scurried back into her cove, blossoming out moments later as a catastrophe-nugget momentarily breaking out of her cocoon of apathy to butter up the worst case response. "The screw can't be fixed so he's welding the arm to the frame." I was like "What? He really is the Architect isn't he?! ... Wait, you're welding my glasses?" Then, "How much will this cost?", "It's a flat rate of $45." ... "Damn you jewelers! There is no fucking spoon!" If I recall correctly, my glasses cost like $100 to begin with. So they throw some fire on them and I pay for my glasses half over again? "Why don't you diamond-dealers fuse my knee together and take turns stabbing me in the eye until my retina really does explode." Remembering that my pockets had $30 to their name (Chandler), I yelled into the vacuum that I would soon be back, that I need to go over to Fred Meyer to get more money. Fred Meyer is a one-stop-shopping, half Walmart, half grocery type store typically found in the north-west. This is irrelevant, except that it also contains my credit union and an ATM machine. It is also right across the street from Matrix Jewelers. What follows is the reason I would never leave my house if given the option...
The Journey
My vision isn't super bad, but legally I'm supposed to be wearing glasses when I drive, so it was perfect that Fred Meyer was right across the street. I could simply walk over there, get my money and come back. Also, I noticed my depth-perception had contorted in some way over the last few years because I feel like I'm 14 feet tall and falling face-down without my glasses on. I had not anticipated just how congested this street would be during rush hour. I stood there for a minute or two and realized there was no chance in Hell I would be crossing this street in the near future. So I began my journey! (1) I walked down the sidewalk alongside the road to the distant intersection (2), went to press the walk button to go across, and it was frozen in place. I pushed it, I caressed it, I punched it. Not so much as a crack. Of course, this was perfectly consistent with the previous half of my day. This morning my car door and lock had been frozen. My key nearly broke off in the lock when I tried to unlock the door, and when I did, I had to make tugging motions to release it from its crystallized shell, and then the door wouldn't shut anymore... it preferred to just slam up against the door-frame with atrocious clanging/boinging sounds. Waves of glaring metallic lava flowed through the intersection in a performance of light-directed disorder. I counted my options, the one option that I had (I didn't count very long), and jumped headfirst into the chaos. I walked over and slammed the walk button to go the other direction, across the intersection the other way, thinking I would eventually get to my destination by going through three consecutive wrong directions to compensate for the disabled, desired direction. I waited a short while, and my time came. I walked across, went to hit the second button in my three-part full-circle of mistakes, and discovered that it was frozen in place as well, reflecting the headlights of 72 metric tons of magma off its ice-glazed exterior to remind me that I would not be undoing my mistake anytime soon (3). Once again, I counted my option. I counted it once and then gave consideration to counting it again in an attempt to deflect this esoteric mind game descending from the stars.
I just kept walking straight, far away to a point where the traffic thinned out. Spent a few moments waiting for my opportunity and crossed the street. Then I treked back to the corner of the intersection, the place I could have been minutes earlier if something with incredible power hadn't gotten bored of Cloud 9 and started pissing down on me from the overworld, only to find out that yes, the walk button here was also frozen beyond the threshold of functionality (4). I took in all my options, and then cursed at the one I happened upon. The road I now had access to has a barrier down the middle, so you can shuffle halfway across the road, wait, and then cross the other half, thus making it possible to pass through even during the nastiest rush-hour traffic. I walked a little ways along the road, and then jaywalked a penguinesque meanderance of despair across the first slippery half of the concrete-cloven street. I walked along the middle barrier for a time as I waited for the traffic moving in the left direction to dissipate. Right at this very moment is when I knew I hit rock bottom (5). I crossed the remaining half of the street and conquered my way across the murderous parking lot. Upon entering Fred Meyer, I started thinking of Street Fighter II as I always do for some mystic reason, and passed on over to the ATM machine. Which said "Out of Service" on the screen (6)... and the credit union had a line that stretched for reason. I found it rather difficult to maintain my balance on the linoleum floor with wet shoes while simultaneously kicking myself in the head, so I made a quick stop at the adjacent pharmacy and asked them if they had a sleeping pill the size of a football and some cherry flavored gasoline (7).
After leaving the premises, I found my most obvious option staring back at me across the street I had just crossed earlier. My option lay at Safeway, another store with an ATM machine. I went through the same two-step process that had earlier delivered me into the waiting arms of defeat, and dashed through the vicious Safeway parking lot. In I walked, looking out at the mass of fuzzy faces I might have been able to recognize if The Architect had not hijacked my glasses to melt them together. This ATM worked (8), I pulled out enough money to ensure that a similar adventure would not soon again eat away at my spirit, and left. By this time, I noticed that the traffic had died down a bit, and like a fool, made a 20-minute gamble that I would be able to cross that street I had originally planned on crossing in the first place. I crossed the divided lanes of ice-covered, agonizing asphalt once again, battled up through the parking lot, and successfully crossed the very street that forced me to update my website (9).
I headed on into the jewelry store, where the two pairs of eyes from the den once again interpreted me as a mobile problem. The other woman came out and handed me my glasses. The first thing I noticed about my glasses was that it appeared as though the right rubber earguard had been run through a meat grinder and then glued back onto the metal pole with substandard glue. It was literally hanging off my glasses. The foundation of my regret had now fully been established, and this woman decided to build the sensation of sting upon it. "They look fixed to me!" I proceeded to wiggle the right arm of my glasses right to left and in and out. The problem of the arm coming out of the frame had been fixed, to some mediocre degree, I'm sure, but the arm still wasn't pushing back in. Hell, I would have stuck with the electrical tape if this was all that they had in mind. And if I stuck with the electrical tape I wouldn't have a mangled half-pipe of rubber hanging off the end. Also, based on their explanation of what was done, it sounds like if anyone else knew how to fix my glasses better, their attempts would now be futile after the application of this bastardization modification. "They're still not spring loaded," she said. She must have read the dissatisfaction plastered over my face, because I then heard "Are you happy with them?" and I said in as many indirect ways as possible that I could have fixed my glasses just as well with an Erector Set. The woman whom I'd talked to before came out quickly and told me they could weld the arm to the frame so that it wouldn't be able to bend. I told them I think it's time I get new glasses, and then, not knowing quite how to phrase this, came out and said "Do I have to pay anything for this?" The woman looked at me like I was a con man, saying "Well, I can't let you go without paying something, how about half price?" I got out my wallet, inquiring "So that's ... $22.50?" She replied, "$20 will be fine." She took the money, I stood around for a moment longer thinking I'd get some type of receipt or something, a souvenir from the time my glasses exploded and I was defecated on by a jewelry store five days later. It got awkward, and it soon became obvious that I was not getting any sort of proof that this happened, so I left the small jewelry shack behind the hardware store in a stupor with the very distinct feeling that I had just been violated in some manner.
So I got into my car, took a few moments to figure out what just happened, and drove home. The right earguard fell off the moment I got into my car, and has now been replaced by a mass of electrical tape. For $20, 40 minutes of intersection and ATM fun, nervous interactions, and the opportunity to be shit on by a jewelry store, the electrical tape switched ends and my glasses are now a cryptic, proprietary piece of equipment branded by the profit-ridden pipe-dreams of The Architect. Oh yes, and to further sand-blast my wounds with sodium chloride, when I came home and told my mom my story, she said that the building right next to Matrix Jewelers, a building I've come to ignore over the last ten years, is also my credit union, and they have an ATM as well. If there is a lesson here, it is this: when life flushes you down the toilet, just hold out for Friday.
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Yo! So, keeping with the tradition of the last three weeks, I'm here once again, on the weekend, putting in the time. I imagine this streak won't last much longer, but what can you do. I'm still busy as the hizzy, but since I spend all week working and thinking with virtually no slack time (except for my daily Sealab 2021 half hour and Software Engineering, which are really just two sides of the same coin when you have a teacher like mine), I'm too tightly wound to relax on the weekend or something like that so I have to produce something! Produce! I swear stuff happened to me this week, but it seems irrelevant because I've had my mind set on a "list update" for several days now. I wanted to make a list of something, anything really, preferably with pictures. Preferably a list with pictures that includes older video game related items so that I have an excuse to post screenshots of old-school video games. That's all I need. So, after a fair amount of thought, here is what I came up with!
Discouraging Moments in UltraMuffin's Childhood
The Thermo-Nuclear Papercut
 So I'm not entirely sure what this image is. It's supposed to be a dorsal view of the central nervous system. Of what creature, I'm not sure. The point is, this was supposed to be a picture of a thumbnail. I've never had a reason to search for the word thumbnail in Google's image search before, but I knew the moment I pressed the search button that the results were going to be chaotic. Chaotic wasn't the half of it, look at that thing! I searched for thumbnail, and this image showed up on the first page of results, so it's good enough for me. I first tried to go with a couple guys boxing, but that image was broken, so you folks get the dorsal nervous system instead. So anyway, the first item on my list of childhood discouragements is the thermo-nuclear papercut. Interpret that phrase how you may, perhaps Mr. Dorsal Nervous over here to the left plays a small role. This was in the first grade. I guess it's your job when you're young to hurt yourself so you can figure out what you want to stay away from for the rest of your life. But I had already learned my papercutting lesson several times over! So why did I do this? Extra credit on my life lessons I suppose? One day, in first grade, bored out of my mind, I wondered what would happen if I stuck a single page of my text book between my thumbnail and thumb and slid my thumb across the page as fast as possible. The simple fact that I'm writing about this experiment fourteen years after I took initiative should give you a nice, vivid picture of the results. I didn't use the term "thermo-nuclear" for nothing.
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All Dogs Go To Heaven
 My dad thought it would be an interesting experiment to start showing me horror movies at the age of four. We carved an unhealthy gash across the likes of the Hellraiser series, the Puppet Master series, and the Nightmare on Elm Street series, but there is one horror movie in particular that sticks out in my mind as the most frightening experience of my early childhood, All Dogs Go To Heaven. I haven't seen this movie in fifteen years and the box art still makes me uncomfortable. From what I recall, this movie was like an animated version of Scarface or Casino, but with a bunch of spiritual damnation and ethical paradoxes mixed in. Why is this on the kid's movie shelf!! One dark, winter night about two years ago I shuffled around the junk in the basement, found our copy of this movie and brought it up to my room. It never even made it into my VCR. I think I ended up watching QVC or something like that. There's no shame in admitting that. The rules of masculinity are a moot point when it comes to All Dogs Go To Heaven. Thank God the Nazis never got ahold of this motion picture.
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Chris Prentice handing my ass to me in Goldeneye 007 for N64
 Back in 1999, my brother begged my parents to do one of his friends a big favor and let him live at our house for a week. This sorta thing never happened at my house, but my brother ended up persuading my parents, and so an interesting fellow by the name of Chris Prentice stayed at our house for a week. Pretty strange week to say the least, but entertaining. After having met Chris, I had him pictured as one of the more popular guys from my high school. A well-built, jock type with highly advanced social abilities whom everyone loved to be around. I, on the other hand, was the awkward, insecure, silent guy who hated life, dressed in all black and didn't even manage to fit in with the goth crowd. I knew what differentiated me from Chris was that I excelled in computers and video games. Maybe he could carry conversations with girls and didn't freak out and start screaming rape in speech class, but he would never be able to hold a candle to me when it came to anything electronic. So when he challenged me to a Goldeneye 007 deathmatch, I tried not to laugh. And then he wiped the floor with me. He got 30 kills for every 1 of mine, and any moment I began to suspect he might be near, it was because I was already dead. Let us never speak of this again.
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The prospect of school catching fire when it's -40° outside
 Just as any school, we had fire drills in my elementary, junior high, and high schools. It gets rather cold in Alaska, especially in Fairbanks. In elementary school, when it was colder than -20°, we had indoor recess. That is to say, even while equipped with full winter attire: hats, gloves, scarves, coats, snow pants, winter boots, sweatshirts, wool socks, face masks, the whole shebang, the school district decided that anything below -20° was too cold to be exposed to for any length of time. Now picture this. You're sitting in class, hoping the teacher doesn't call on you to read the next paragraph of The Black Pearl or some other book designed to make reading seem fun (pick Teeth and Tongue Landscape, teachers!), and that startling, obnoxiously loud fire alarm starts to sound. The teachers force you out of the room, no time to fetch your coat, hat, gloves, etc., of course it's just a drill but that doesn't change the fact that you're standing outside in a t-shirt at -40° losing faith in everything that does, did, or ever once thought about making sense. The teachers tell the students that we have to stand far away from the building because if the school were on fire, the windows would blow out and we have to be far enough away that the broken glass doesn't cut us all to shreds. So basically these fire drills were just an exercise in meandering across the pain gradient while each of us prayed to all things holy that marker-sniffing Timmy wouldn't light the school on fire in January. You can burn to death, you can freeze to death, and if you want something in between, you get to tango with 500 transparent shards of airborne cutting.
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Those yellowish genocide beams from Quick Man's stage
 As far as I'm concerned, these unfair bastards were a right of passage for the entire Nintendo generation. It's no secret I saved Quick Man's stage for last whenever I played Mega Man II, I was just scared is all. The game builds you up, giving you confidence, allowing you to escape the grind of life for just a moment, letting you know that you can make a change in the world. And then these yellowish beams come out of oblivion and smack you down like shovels. I actually had no idea what color these beams were by looking at them, so I opened up my screenshot in The GIMP, which reports their color as FCD8A8, so they are yellowish! I also searched some walkthroughs on GameFAQs to confirm my discovery. I'm falling down Quick Man's stage, high on life, with seven new weapons along with the vanilla Mega Man cannon at my disposal, ready to kick ass and take names and what's this? There's this fuzzy DVOOOOO DVOOOOO DVOOOOO noise covering the masterfully crafted 8-bit symphony and it looks like there's a gang of banana flavored Airheads trying to reach me from somewhere off to the side like they haven't been paying much attention for the first half of the level. Banana banana banana ECHOEY DEATH NOISE! Oh my God, I have been reduced to twelve colored spheres travelling in the four cardinal directions and the rebel directions in between! As if falling ten miles every time I lost my grip on the ladder in Crash Man's stage wasn't enough! They should put these beams in driver training videos with a blinking caption that says "Pain Simulation", and when the entire room empties because people are running from their seat to vomit in the urine chamber, there's a small television in there too that plays nothing but All Dogs Go To Heaven 24 horrific hours of 7 loathsome days. No one would drive again! Hell, I'd quit driving because driving sucks ass!
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This may very well be the end-result of getting less than four hours of sleep a night since last Saturday. I sent this to Wonder Bread (under the category of Consumer Concern):
Dear Wonder Bread,
I have deep concerns for the well-being of your company. Indeed, my concerns span for most of humanity. As a consumer, I have taken it upon myself to inform the array of corporations I find to play the most pivotal roles in our fragile social structure that dire changes are taking place before blind sight and dense awareness. That is, we take what we perceive to be the static nature of the universe for granted, when in fact this cosmic playground shifts and turns in a dynamic display of chaos, for lack of a better term. For the time being, we have whole wheat Wonder Bread, but to what end? How can you, me, or anyone lay faith in the power of Wonder Bread to endure without taking its whole as a series of subatomic particles. From the reactor of all things tuned to state of being splays out grotesque malformations and exceptions to the paradigm we have forged in our minds for the past century. Our so-called "century of science" has only locked us into misguided attempts to understand the unauthorized, to observe and study the timeless frosted prism. Please, Wonder Bread, allow me to open your eyes.
We have to our name, to our species, fruitful bread in a variety of tastes, colors and nutritious states. You know as well as any that a life without a choice, a life without the divine bread-colored rainbow spread out for the taking, with the wheat, the whites, and a synthetic subset of the aforementioned wheat, that is, the bastardized cracked wheat and its sponge-bathing little sister, honey cracked wheat, is a life unworthy of purpose. You see, Wonder Bread, your fine grains and unheard of ability to concoct a desirable loaf have worked and kneaded my consciousness so profoundly over the past few years that my brain has been reborn into a second phase of neurological development. All at once, my head and all matter within degenerated into what was essentially an upside-down bowl of pink Play-Doh. Surprisingly enough, though I estimate this complete breakdown of matter to have occurred in mere seconds, I seemed to have maintained diluted versions of many basic motor skills throughout the experience. It was not until I attempted to direct special agent Sam Fisher through a series of life-threatening objectives for the omniscient group known as Third Echelon that I realized the motor abilities in my thumbs and index fingers had been hampered. While stranded with a mission on a militarized oil rig subject to beautiful sunsets, I managed to traverse tight corridors and scale steel ladders that stretched for miles without detection by distracting heavily armed mercenaries with dead-aimed throws of fresh-sliced cracked-wheat Wonder Bread at overheard light fixtures and helicopters. When the orange, horizon-lingering sun challenged me to a thumb-wrestling skirmish in exchange for my remaining sack of cracked-wheat heaven, I accepted, only to lose my fluffy square grain wafers by account of stiff movements on the part of my right thumb.
After my mind had fully decomposed into what I envision to be a pool of pinkish-red liquid lurking in the socially impenetrable, bone-shielded vault of my cranium, I knew it would soon begin to coagulate once again into a functioning network of cells and synapses. Somehow I knew, Wonder Bread, that this pseudo-gelatinous liquid would not wait for any academic signal before solidifying; it would develop devoid of knowledge if this were necessary to meet the deadline. So I trained this new organism taking form inside of me. I sculpted it with facts and theory, from quantum physics to Christian dogma. Wonder Bread, as a result I have within me that which mere mortals can and will never be able to grasp. Behind these mismatched eyes is a beacon of intergalactic secrets exuding truth through my frail circuitry. I have abstract thoughts, imperceptible to mankind, running the course of my veins in pursuit of the timeless frosted prism. I became overwhelmed with the daunting potential of evil stitching its way in and out of my surging mind. Even more overwhelming was my utter disregard of consequences for any application of such unknown power. After my genetically alien, internally pressurized cerebral cortex grew layer upon layer of vented thick enamel to propel out and protect against malicious thoughts, I came to my senses and used a blue crayon to devise and document ways to use this organ for good. I ate a delicious turkey sandwich encased in white Wonder Bread and listened to the hip-hop stylings of Tupac Shakur during this time of uncertainty.
For betterment and the hopes of an everlasting loaf, I present to you the following breakdown of communication between my awareness muscle and the caverned moon tooth resting atop my still-human spinal column. Contrary to popular belief, time is not the fourth dimension. Had anyone taken the time to break away from convention for even a moment, they would have realized that God is subject to time. That is, God does not exist outside of time. What purpose would there be to mediate events of the past? Thus, I propose that time is a higher dimension. For the time being, lets say that time is the fifth dimension, though I will explain the shortcomings of this over-simplification soon. Consider for a moment what two-dimensional beings would see if they were to stare at a human being, living in third space. Take into consideration that these two-dimensional beings are not able to look up or down, and in fact have no concept of these directions. We must conclude that a two-dimensional being would see a two-dimensional slice of a human. In effect, they would only see a discolored barrier. We can then reason that they would not be able to differentiate their limited view of third-dimensional entities from their two-space world. That is to say, they would not see anything as out of the ordinary or outside the scope of the universe that they know.
Now, what happens when we have God living in the fourth dimension? Analogous to the 2D/3D scenario described above, we constantly witness a three-dimensional slice of God in our day to day lives, we simply do not recognize him. The human intellect can only take us so far, however. There is no way to pinpoint what God is and what God is not when we look from place to place in our mundane, sub-dimensional existence. We would need a clue. We have our clue: the petrified, teeth-plated Play-Doh destroyer lodged in the upper hemisphere of my neck appendage. We are the slices of God. Humans are the three-dimensional layers of God that, when stacked end-to-end across the fourth dimension, constitute the divine. But why are we separate from one another? Why are these slices of God free-roaming over three-space? It stands to reason that each third-dimensional instance of an individual, when stacked across the fourth dimension, forms a separate part of God, a separate organ. Moreover, Wonder Bread, I have come to realize, and perhaps it is this intellectual ability to realize itself that recursively proves the subject of my realization, that my awareness of such hyper-dimensional concerns elevates my thought process to the level only possessed by deities. I must conclude that at this moment I am a singular instance of a series of instances spread out through the fourth dimension to form a neuron, one of God's brain cells. It follows that Jesus of Nazareth, the only known human being to transcend the barriers of time and become immortal, constitutes the undying soul of God over the fourth dimension.
The shielded parasite feeding off my body's nutrients has provided for me faint inclinations that Heaven inhabits the fifth dimension. Essentially, when one of us humble Earth creatures die, we transmigrate into the realm of the lord, not as lords, but as spirits. The aforementioned fifth dimension would seemingly resonate out of the murky pits of absurdity if the cosmic pathways within the vertical tomb of unknown had not also imposed on me a deranged notion that our fourth-dimensional deity is actually one of many. Much as the 2D/3D scenario relates to the 3D/4D scenario, we have an equivalent 4D/5D scenario. The pantheon of gods inhabiting the fourth dimension prove to be slices of the omnipotent, root of all gods commanding over all in the fifth dimension. Thus, we have that the time dimension is now the sixth dimension. This must be true for the plated enamel brain's musings to be consistent with one another. Independent of the divine detachments of truth raining down upon me, I propose that Jesus of Nazareth, the immortal being of the third dimension, whom we have established as the series of segments composing the soul of our four-spaced God-figure, is in truth the soul of Zeus, or Jupiter by Roman mythology. Thus, I have reasoned that Zeus is the savior amongst the entire Greco-Roman pantheon. Moreover, the states of Zeus over time conglomerate into the soul of our fifth-dimensional root God. As a consequence, the root God utilized Zeus as a channel by which to transmit Jesus of Nazareth to three-space. Subsequently, we have formed the Holy Trinity, far-removed from the baseless dogma of orthodox Catholic beliefs. Wonder Bread, I have peered into the depths of the timeless frosted prism.
It has been established that Heaven, at least the Heaven known as the final destination for human entities, exists in the fifth dimension. This, Wonder Bread, is why I must confess my alarming discoveries to you, as the bearers of our savior's body in its many whimsical shapes and nutritious states. I have come to realize, through the extraordinary sense granted me by the creased white cerebrum, that three-space is collapsing in on itself. Our so-called third dimension has merely become a play of two-dimensional shapes emulating what humans perceive to be the third dimension. These two-space shapes have evolved to the point of mimicking complex geometric patterns, producing uncanny visions perfectly consistent with any given point of view, with any angle, with any perspective. The human configuration is collapsing, or has collapsed, down a dimension. We are, or soon will be, two-spaced beings tricked into believing we live in three-space. Consequently, the Greek pantheon has fallen into the human dimension, and yes Wonder Bread, I dread that the root God has also slipped into the fourth dimension, the realm vacated by the pantheon.
So what of the fifth dimension? What happens when time falls into a realm incapable of mediating the flow of events and the successive layerings of sub-dimensional entities? Is the time dimension static? Perhaps the stability of the cosmos rests on the foundation of an unaffected presence of time in the sixth dimension. As queried previously, what of the fifth dimension? The shielded alien network residing locally within my head exhausted its secrets weeks ago, and I am left to crack the code alone. As deciphered by me from this upheaval of space-time, the best possibly outcome is the existence of a space-time vacuum infecting the empty fifth dimension, which could potentially form a wormhole to one of its sub-dimensions. However, I am willing to wager that the abundance of dormant space and resources in the universe would opt for a duplicate of, rather than a connection to, an existing sub-domain. No logical way exists for us to reason which sub-domain will be selected by the void, only that it will be linked or duplicated in the fifth dimension. Let us not forget that the fifth dimension is the realm of mankind's Heaven, hence we transmigrate to five-space following our respective deaths. My conclusion is that, depending upon the sub-domain chosen by the five-space void, our souls will not teleport to their rightful destination save for the possibility of a fifth-dimensional link to the root God collapsed into four-space. We will most likely be placed within a realm unfamiliar to us, either in a one-space world emulating two-space, analogous to our current problematic situation with intelligent two-space vectors, or perhaps in no space at all, total oblivion. We may also be reincarnated into our current two-space in a way similar yet foreign to Hindu beliefs. Rather than being reborn as humans or animals, we will sprout from obscurity as lost spirits. Such is also the case if the fifth-dimensional vacuum chooses to duplicate three-space or two-space emulating three-space. If, in actuality, time is dynamic, the collapse of a dimension may have produced a recursive life-cycle spanning two to three dimensions from generation to generation without bound. The dying souls of today will inhabit the realm of tomorrow, leading the way in successive jumps to new frontiers stretching out for eternity.
Peace be with you, Wonder Bread, and stay strong during this time of uncertainty.
Dr. Rupert Collins
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First of all, if you think I dropped in to archive some posts and cut down on the size of this absurd front page, you've gone loco. The more text I have on a single page, the more whacky-ass search phrases I find on my statistics page. I didn't have the burning desire to update right now, but I decided I'd just open up gedit and see if anything flowed. So far, nothing, but I'll keep blabbing until something happens. I achieved a marvelous ratio of sleep to coffee last night and the following afternoon. Typical Thursday night. I spend every night before Thursday working on Physics homework, then when Thursday comes around, I find myself with the dire affliction of Linear Algebra homework molesting my consciousness. So I procrastinoot a good two or three hours, ate bread, watched X-Play, thought about Christmas and admired those fearful ravens from afar. It dawned upon me that none of these things were getting my homework done so I loaded up on the Colombian bean essence and cranked away for an hour and a half before the nervous breakdown known as Sealab 2021 once again found its way to my television screen. By the time I realized my homework assignment made less sense than a baker's dozen of sea cucumbers transcending communication barriers, and consequently my time might be better spent just getting some sleep so that the UltraMuffin who wakes up in the morning doesn't view sleep as the end-all justification to every facet of life, I had enough demon seed in my system to last through November. If sleep were a child, well damn I don't even know if I want to think about that. Imagine how hard it would be to get his ass off the couch and make him get a job. Not like my math minor! That rascal is set for life. I acquired three hours of sleep to call my own. It was nearly impossible to wake up, but for some unexplainable reason, by the time noon rolled around, I experienced one of those rare moments when I actually feel plugged securely into my environment. There was no daydreaming, no getting side-tracked, and I had a keen sense of what was going on in Linear Algebra for the first time since the second day of class. So much so that the instructor came across as a vessel expressing my thoughts on a ten-second delay using a British-ish accent at arbitrary moments. This phase of distilled focus has arisen once or twice in the past. There has to be some perfect ratio of sleep deprivation to coffee that conjures up this phenomenon, and I'll find it, willingly or not!
During the summer, at work, Alex went off on this rant about how freaky the movie Return to Oz is. I had never seen this movie before. In fact, I didn't even know it existed. He described these creatures called "The Wheelers", how insane it was to put something so freaky in a more-or-less children's movie, and how they will haunt him for the rest of his life. I'm paraphrasing a bit here; the conversation actually lasted about ten minutes, but these ten minutes of terror were synchronized with a light show of pentagrams and hyper-dimensional vats of boiling goat's blood projecting outward from his iris, perplexing the wall and likewise the waste basket nestling near the foot of the wall while the spinning visual landscape of twice again warped reality added unwelcomed air pressure antiparallel to the centripetal vector, calculated by the velocity of rotation squared divided by the frequency at which any of us attend Sunday Mass. Undefined as pure evil. I rented Return to Oz as soon as possible to see what all the fuss was about. I asked my dad if he'd seen Return to Oz, to which he replied "Is that the one with those guys with wheels?". I said "The Wheelers?" and he shuddered. I mentioned the movie in IRC and received a fair share of text-based shudders from there as well. Someone said that they've spent the last fifteen years trying to forget that dreadful squeaking noise the wheels made. There must have been a bit too much buildup because when I watched this movie, when The Wheelers made their entrance, I retained half my piss and played off the leaking remainder as a simultaneous jean darkening and cooling mechanism. I figured this was one of those things you had to see as a child for it to be genuinely scary today, much like everything in the original Wizard of Oz, The Neverending Story I and II, The Last Unicorn, All Dogs Go To Heaven, and Hellraiser. However, a mere month after seeing this movie it started to develop a bizarre, premature nostalgic value. And this, if you're still with me, is why I wake up instantly every time I walk into the auditorium in which the physics lecture occurs. Every chair in this auditorium is attached with a metal arm and hinge to one of many long desks, and some of these hinges aren't properly oiled because it sounds like I'm walking into a stadium-seated corner of Hell when those horrendous metal arms conduct their Wheeler symphony. I'm trying to learn about forces and terminal velocity but I lose focus and jerk my vision to the field of happenings over my right shoulder at an alarming speed any time someone sitting behind me needs to reposition their junk. This was not in the course description!
For a field as logical as physics, I never cease to be amazed how logic simply breaks down in and around that class. For starters, there's an extremely attractive girl in that class who seems to spend roughly 60% of her time staring at completely random people. Imagine that! Everyone should be staring at her, but instead she's staring at everyone else while they stare at the teacher. Not that I have any clue how these things are supposed to work, after the surplus of testosterone offered up semester after semester in computer science classes. In computer science classes everyone stares at their laptops while I stare at Tetris DX on my Gameboy Advance. The most profound part of it all is that this girl carries with her a water bottle marked with a sticker saying "I poke badgers. Cheese is good." Makes me think I might be able to carry a conversation with this girl. On Monday, I experienced a logic gap so large I lost faith in my mental health. About twenty minutes into class, I started to hear a sound somewhat like a broken speaker playing static. It had a hint of pneumatics in there as well. Perhaps it can best be described as a gust of wind blowing electronic gravel across asphalt. I was certain that it was growing louder by the second, and when I wondered as to what it could be, I remembered that I had gotten a nice eight hours of sleep that night. Then I was at peace. My mind seemed perfectly content using this as an explanation as to where the sound was coming from. Two and a half hours passed and in a moment of retrospection, I thought back on my reasoning and concluded "What the hell?" It's like my brain is trying to emulate a coherent thought process and some crucial connection isn't holding up its end of the deal! I still haven't figured out why I think about salad anytime someone uses the acronym STFU. As I was walking into the physics building today, I bumped into some dude when I opened the door. We both apologized and then he took two steps, put out his arms as if he were pretending to be an airplane and then ran at full speed on the ice, across the street and into the woods. I looked past him into the woods, nothing there. It's a good thing the weekend is here. I think God bit off a little more than I could chew this week.
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It's been a while! I've been busy as a coked up humming bird spilling her guts in a confessional. Yes, her. Since that Failure 02 of last update doesn't really count as an entry per se, I haven't had an honest update since I left for Las Vegas. This is the first semester I've ever worked a part-time job while in school, now I understand what all these people have been bitching about all these years! It's hard work! It wouldn't be half as bad if I weren't enrolled in my current asphyxiation-basket of classes. I'm taking Physics (the 200-level, calculus-based, elitism-catalyst physics), Linear Algebra (If you're not in the know, you don't want to be. Algebra is to Linear Algebra what Tic Tacs are to the guillotine, complete with every abstract left turn in between.), Information Assurance (a "hacking" type class that is seeming more and more like two or three classes in one, with an equivalent work-load), and Software Engineering (okay, this one doesn't really count). This isn't the first semester I've taken a buncha scary sounding classes, but lordy, this IS the first time they've been as much work as they're made out to be. I spend eight to ten hours on Physics homework every week, anywhere from four to eight hours on Linear Algebra homework, a bottomless pit of time in Information Assurance, and sometimes I'm even forced to remember I'm in Software Engineering! It's time consuming stuff, but luckily it's not busy work, so I tend to zone out into the land of logic while the hours go by for each classes' homework assignment. And I've finally learned my lesson: under no circumstances should Sealab 2021 be on your television when you're trying to do homework. That show is a multimedia EMP grenade designed to knock out my concentration every thirty seconds for an unrelenting fifteen minutes. And then another fifteen minutes when the next back-to-back God-forsaken spectacle of Erik Estrada fingerpaint smears across the 27 inch grid of miniature phosphorus autism rectangles like a rusted drill thrashing through my limbic system. Damn I love that show!
Las Vegas got boring very quickly. I suppose it's just not the kind of place that's designed for me. I don't drink, I don't "party" (unless you consider playing Kung Fu Chaos for six hours with friends a party, wooo!), and I had strong suspicions that I don't gamble either, and that turned out to be true. The live tables are intimidating, so I ended up tinkering with an assortment of machines designed to take my currency and kick me in the testicles. I wasted $10 in slot machines first. My money went up and down and then it was gone. I found a small glass-encased race track the size of a picnic table where I could pay quarters to bet on little plastic race horses. No part of this sounded like a good idea, but watching poorly motivated chunks of decrepit plastic run away with my money sounded slightly more entertaining than seeing three bands of marketing spin around in a failure frenzy, making electronic turkey noises to mask the threat of remote lobotomy. There was even an Alien-franchise nickel slot machine with 20 pay lines, so it took $1.00 per round to squeeze every bit of green dripping fun out the sumbitch. I played it once, my dad played it four times, and I saw a woman play it for about five minutes and never once saw that machine pay a damn thing, even though it had cool blue lights and made Alien sounds. My dad and I rode the New York, New York rollercoaster fourteen times in one day. My dad vomited three times in the bathroom throughout this crusade, and after we passed round eleven I began to wonder if my brain could simply fly out the side of my head one of these times. It was pretty rickety! The third time my dad puked, he was in the bathroom for twenty minutes. He decided he was done for the day because a whole chunk of hot dog, complete in cylindrical form, had been reborn out of his left nostril. Immediately, this made me start thinking about the movie Total Recall. Also while in Las Vegas, I won a giant 2.5 foot lime green die (singular of dice) by throwing eight small basketballs into a lonely looking hoop. There's no drought of cars with fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror, but I thought I might be the only one with a gargantuan green die riding shotgun. Turns out the damn thing can't even fit through the door! And then I also met up with Sana, a girl I met in IRC about two months before leaving for Vegas. She works at the GAP in the Caesar's Palace forum shops, so it only made sense that I visit. But if there's one place in this world I don't belong, it's the GAP.
When the awe and wonder of being in Las Vegas for the third time died down, when I once again realized that Vegas is not the place for me, I ended up spending lots of time watching television in the hotel room between visits to McDonalds, the internal organ disrupter. Those Excalibur devils have a McDonald's, Krispey Kreme's and Cold Stone ice cream assembled into an upsetting digestive polygon within the casino. I spent every afternoon in this Bermudal agony-shaped three-point triglyceride conundrum and then wasted away the remainder of the day regretting my actions and swearing never to do it again. On the television, I watched three episodes of a Spanish Jerry Springer type show. Not quite sure what I saw. Each episode was an hour long, the entire front row of the audience was deformed in every episode, the host looked like a woman who used to babysit me, and there were two panels of three people who sat up in alcoves on the stage detached from the world. The deformed included a retarded looking teen who turned out to be one of the more vocal of the audience members, a woman who's face looked like the weird end of an elephant, another woman who had a huge nose not unlike three noses attached to one another in succession, and a guy who maybe wasn't deformed but wore a black knit winter hat and had a giant Hitler mustache. The six individuals constituting the two on-stage panels included three brightly dressed people on the left panel, one of which was an incredibly flamboyant man, and then on the right panel, a small person, a cranky granny in a wheelchair with a cast on her right leg, and a woman in a red jump suit with her hair formed into a palm tree who played the xylophone when the camera pointed at her. When the show's guests acted up, the woman in the red jump suit would storm from her alcove down to the guests and scream Spanish (obscenities?) at them while the word ĄDURO! written in a highly '80s font with harsh edges flickered and skedaddled amongst the unfolding atrocities. One of the episodes I caught was one of them "My teenage daughter dresses like a slut" episodes. UltraMuffin tends to like those episodes the most.
I finished that Phantoms in the Brain book I'd been reading. I say this a lot, but it was definitely one of the best books I've ever read. Not only that, but it's a book I would recommend to everyone. You can check out the Reviews section for more on that. Also, just two hours ago I finished reading Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon by Chuck Palahniuk. What a strange book. It's not all you'd expect from Chuck Palahniuk. Fine, I'll just come out and say it. It was 75% boring, 10% interesting and 15% weird. I was hoping it would be more like 50% interesting and 50% weird. You know, without all that boring stuff about train museums and rose gardens getting in the way. Thank God it was short! I think the best part was when he talked about SantaCon, an annual event where people come from far and wide to dress up as Santa and rampage around town for 72 hours. He was describing the SantaCon of '96 where 450 people dressed as Santa faced off against a SWAT team. Some people like to go to Las Vegas, SantaCon sounds more up my alley. Now comes the best part of reading, trying to decide on which book to start next! I'm thinking either Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley or maybe even the second book in the Amber Chronicles by Roger Zelazny. I want to buy more neurology books but there's no excuse for buying more books when I have a pile of 10+ in queue. Though I should probably buy and read A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick before the movie, of which I know nothing, comes out. Also, after injecting about an hour's worth of time into the Amazon for some unknown reason, I found a book about parasites that I'm going to end up buying. Your guess is as good as mine.
Oh yes, and The Fluff Junction is doing it! It's taking on a life of its own! Sort of! It's been getting massive traffic lately. The number of visits advertised on the front page is actually the number of pictures people have clicked on, but that number increases like 1000 each day. That's pretty good! Every once in a while someone outside of the regulars will upload pictures. People need to start voting though! That Top Rated page is one of the coolest aspects of all things Fluff.
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