Even in his dream he knew He'd never get away Not even for a day Then... A peanut hit him on the nose. Page 42 of this. I recently graduated from the two year program at Gateway Community College. Yes, after five years, those two years are finally done. I wished not to be involved with the silly ceremony. I do not feel honored to dress like a twit, walk around in a line and then wait through the same pointless ceremony I've seen so many times when I wasn't graduating. I thought I'd be doing my immediate family members a favor (or less of an unfavor) to keep this as brief as possible and spare us all one more mediocre with special-sauce student rendition of I Believe I can Fly. However, my parents seemed legitimately interested in watching the process again, and neither of my brothers even knew it was happening, so it turns out it's just as selfish for me to want to avoid it regardless of whose name is possibly listed somewhere in the fake books being handed out. I might as well go to every graduation ceremony that ever happens. From my own selfish, demented viewpoint the only thing being honored is pointless, superannuated tradition with no relevance to anything nor any entertainment value. Instead of a commencement speaker they might as well project the latest edition of Beetle Bailey or Archie on a screen (or really just about any newspaper comic strip more than 5 years old, nevermind 50). Gateway doesn't give out real diplomas; they call students one-by-one, slowly, to the stage to receive blank rolled up pieces of paper, and the diplomas are only available later at the school itself, so I'm not even really done with that place yet. The graduation display itself did not happen there, but rather at some comparitively fancy place not visible from the highway. We couldn't let our distinguished guests form an honest opinion of the place, after all. Two hours of might-as-well-be anonymous apparent clones at a place unrelated to any of their courses, obtaining meaningless documents to Macho Man Randy Savage's entrance music (I realize I mentioned that on the page I linked to, but I do not think that one fact is mentioned nearly enough). It's more like a cult than anything else. Except without the refreshments and subsequent news coverage. The other graduators, they are not my friends. I've either never met them before or have met and hated. I feel no comraderie with them. I experience no shared enthusiasm to be deprived of my individuality at the same time and place as them. Just as there's no known reason for the music to always be the same, the uniforms are uniformly bizarre in any place they are seen. I don't have a problem with the druid robe, though I wish they weren't made out of cheap tablecloths. Considering that I had to return it, you might have thought it cost more than a dollar to make. But it's the square hats I truly hate. They remind me of cartoon owls. Or worse. Much much worse. Through a bizarre set of circumstances related to my lack of public independence, my hat was stolen. It wasn't intentionally stolen; the hat was in a plastic bag which the thief placed a more desirable object into to conceal the theft of. (the plastic bag being less conspicuous than the desirable object which might have been identified as another's property.) What about this guy? No one's making him dress like that. He even has a robe, and refuses to wear it. He'd rather use it to assist in his Hagar slacks model pose, with the obvious difference that he isn't wearing pants. Anyone else but you would have known that was obvious and not have needed me to point it out. WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?! I'm not even talking about the galactic empire's clone army anymore, I mean the meepletoasts with cameras. Am I really supposed to believe every one of them has a website that they intend to complain upon about this gathering? As much as I hate when garbage, swappable celebrities mention myspace.com just to get a cheap pop from a studio audience of young twunks, I allow it to happen because I know a significant portion of the population only knows myspace from all the news stories about kids getting raped and/or kidnapped, and must get really confused when they hear the positive response. Now that I have mentioned it, though, even I'm confused by the positive response. Sunday, July 8, 2006 How much cinnamon will ye purchase? I just saw a 20-20 "report" about high-heeled shoes and women taking special exercise classes to not fall down while wearing them, and having foot-alteration surgery to be able to fit into them. The segment did not seem to seek to condemn these so much as just make the general public aware of them. Almost as if to say "What are you waiting for, ladies? Stop being ugly! Treatment is available!" The phrase "limousine shoes" was used without irony. If you carried around multiple pairs of shoes with you without having a special giant car to match them, that would be silly, wouldn't it. There's really not much I need to say on this, because the chances are if you've paid money and scheduled appointments in the name of awkward shoe readiness, I already hated you for some other shallow, decadent, self-destructive, conceited, overpriced, illogical, stupid, ignorant thing you do all the time. I instead come to offer an alternative: A return to foot binding. Why risk the daughter you won't permit to grow up intelligent having feet that are slightly too big for a thing that's intentionally manufactured too small and could easily be manufactured larger? If you employ ancient, currently illegal Chinese wisdom to prevent the feet from growing, you stop the problem before it starts. You aren't supposed to. Just stand there and look pretty. Sure, she'll hate you and wish for death in confrontation with the pain, but only until full societal indoctrination takes over, at which point she will think she's better than anyone with unaltered feet, and would gladly cast the peasants disapproving glances were it possible to turn her head without offsetting balance and flopping over. It simply isn't enough to be irritable, in pain and unstable while wearing shoes, you must be irritable, in pain and unstable at all times. A council of gay men insists this is what they would find desirable if they weren't gay. Later on Nightline, my favorite, was a story about a United Stately-born man who runs a gambling website out of Costa flupping Rica that preys on sick North Americans. If he felt the slightest bit of guilt (he doesn't), I might have interpreted the mentions of his charity as attempts to justify becoming a millionaire on money no service was rendered for. However, running a charity and a gambling website cancel each other out. That makes Calvin Eyre (his name, I think, but don't wish to look up) completely average and unworthy of comment. If, that is, both ventures are equally successful. The amount of personal estate land, large loud vehicles and expensive drinks he surrounds himself with suggest plenty of his profit killing America goes to self-indulgence, so he's still a scumcylinder. His charity is just his name preceded by "the" and followed by "foundation." A lot of good charities are so unoriginally and vainly named (Helena Rubinstein, hello), but this does count for some negative points if considered in addition to other things about a person which bother me. And all those things considered, this man is a true flibwiffarg. You'd have to be if your only arguments for peddling financial black holes are "ha ha, guess what, that's legal in this country!" and "I'm not here to discuss that." Also, the bigger the smile you have while debating on camera the "rules" of the interview, the bigger the unrequested condiment-filled water balloon I'm going to throw at you when I find you. I have been busy with things of varying signifigance a lot recently, and have avoided several proper page updates. And now I have again. "They" just got through telling us we need extra wide screens. Why, now, is it that we need extra tall screens or extra thin screens on portable video-playing telephone devices? I understand the desire for extra wide screens. Human, and actually most applicable beings I am aware of have eye points arranged horizontally, giving a wide view rather than a tall one. True, for those watching these things, the eyes don't function properly unless they are focused on the same point, meaning you probably get more like a square. But still. It's a square slightly elongated along the x axis. I know the merchants of these trinkets did not go out and build all new cameras to take altered aspect ratio shots, so 50% of the picture is cut off, or more than it, if it was filmed with the cameras made for the wide screens (ehhh, if we accept those truly are extra wide screens and not slightly less tall screens). If you say "yayuhh, but the stuff you can watch on that isn't worth watching anyway," as I did (but without the "yayuhh") when I first heard what those things were, then you wouldn't have the fancy telephone. Also, Wheel of Fortune?! If you can't actually reach out and touch the wheel/win money, you're just playing Hangman, and why would you, on that tiny little screen, against non-existent opponents? With that maniacal facial expression? I'm certain there are good games for these things. Why show tired tripe like this? I'm pretty sure the one on the right is Pac-Man. It makes me mad that the only games that are allowed to matter are barest basic boredomials from 25 years ago or ultra realistic creativity-devoid 3d fruitbaskets from yesterday. Not that I'm especially keened towards The Worst Non-Murderers in the World suddenly taking a liking to and making a national fuss about Landstalker or Gobliins 2 where there had once been Amazing Army Guys VII or Dance Dance Dance Dance Dance Revolution Bastille Day Edition*, but it could be better than this. The preceding thought it was going to be part of the fifth in my forgettable series of mall pages, but my management skills have deteriorated to a point at which I am not sure I can assemble one of those now, and I also took all the pictures so long ago I can't remember any unifying "story," and in the absense of the story I started inserting pictures into it from multiple trips, so now it's just a random mix of short, unrelated items at varying levels of completion, and there's no reason not to plunder the rudimentary aborted fetus of a page of its few finished parts and try to salvage something for this, the page of short, unrelated items at similar levels of completion. So. You watch your mouth! Or some biologically applicable equivelant. *That is today, July 14, by the way. You're lucky my guillotine is being repaired at the moment! Saturday, July 15, 2006 Accept no substitutes unless they're convincing I hope, as ever, for your and others' sakes that you do not use the myspaces, but if you do, saw something like this, recognized it from advertising on another media format and still were compelled to click on it, I probably hate you. It is true I befriended the "Carson Daly" page as a joke, but it quickly occurred to me that 90% of its friends were probably ironic, and I only left it where it was because of how weird the associated picture was and the contrast this provided when viewed with its few neighbors. I have learned the error of my ways. Also, each additional minute I look at any website with "my" in its name takes one day off my total lifespan, and that's not worth validating my relationship level with people who I can at best fling brief, inconsequential comments at to be lost and anonymized among the brief inconsequential comments of other people who aren't even my friends in theory, let alone reality. So. The first fake person I mentioned is also weird, but it's weird in a Sesame Street Elmo or mayonnaise kind of way that I find repelling. It's not enough that we claim as "friends" identityless nicknames who we'll probably never have anything to do with; we need ones we can't possibly have anything to do with ever. This is an ad for a movie posing as an imaginary internet person. It makes no sense. What incentive is there for me to attempt interaction with it? This ad for a movie isn't going to chat (points to the British for getting at least one non-American phrase accepted as ubiquitous international internet jargon) with you. It's not going to leave you a personal message. It's not even going to try to rape you. It's just going to be there, and it's going to be there for a long time after everyone forgets about it. I will not forget! Also, is Little truly the New Big? A few months ago I heard a program segment, possibly of Nightline, introduced with "is Iran the new Iraq?." No. Iran is the new Persia. I hate when people say thoughtless things like "40 is the new 30" "white is the new black" or "comatose is the new awake." No, that's impossible. You are stupid if you say things of that nature. In this case, "the new big" isn't even applicable to the movie. It's just there to be stupid. Why be somewhere to be stupid? If it turns out that's not an ad for a movie, but just the page for a person who adopted to represent itself a section of a picture I've definitely seen in ads, then that person is stupid, ironic or not. I can't imagine why the page would be "featured" if it was worth seeing. As for the movie itself, before this one went and did it, I would not have expected "from the creator of White Chicks" to be a thing one lists as a positive attribute. As always, it is possible that it is just the horrible advertising, of which the myspace page is a member, that is ah horrible, but as also always, I doubt it. Page 43 of this. I'm not confused. If you think I'm confused then you're confused, though I assume a majority of people won't think a bit of it either way. However, a majority of people won't see this at all! I keep trying to make this message not dumb, but it does not seem to be possible. It cannot be excused. A lot of pondering takes place when you spend five days coloring what took about two hours to draw. So don't do that. Don't do this either. Draw it right the first time so you don't feel inclined to say anything to excuse preserving an unfortunate thing you don't want to specifically mention. Yes, the picture at right is from a different page. Of course I know that! I AM NOT FOOLED. I was recently reading a bit about circumcisions, wondering why having them done is so common among people with no religious reasons for subjecting their children to it. I also sought to figure out if my own family engaged in this sort of thing, through consideration of statistics rather than by asking a pertinent parent or examining evidence. And then... Ehhh, I'd rather not. I think mere typed words have more than satisfied my curiosity about this subject. I believe you. Beside that, my spyware tracking cookies would never forgive me if I clicked a link comprising just words like that. Sunday, July 23, 2006 This is Teddy Dustpants. He's a lollypop! You're just a regular geek if you think the words which are printed on this seemingly unwearable garment are funny jokes, or even jokes. These look like the sort of things that would get printed in Player's Pulse. YOU KNOW YOU ARE A NINTENDO GEEK WHEN... you spent your summer vacation in Hyrule Already an error. According to this tense the heading should be you knew you were a Nintendo Geek when... followed by a description of the approximate moment when you knew. This is important information. People must become aware of the exact status of their geekitude, so to better seek treatment, I guess. You learned to drive by playing Mario Kart That there is highly unlikely. I found my experience with video games actually impeded my earliest attempts at automobile operation, since left and right are swapped when reversing. I also frequently left the keys hanging off the door because I forgot I could use them more than once. You know what Goombas, Koopas and Shy Guys are. That's right, because only geeks read the instruction book! Maybe the implication here is that anyone but geeks merely rented the games, which previous renters had inevitably lost the book for. I can personally attest to having found an instruction book for Goemon 64 underneath some furniturial object at least two years after being totally baffled by the game as a result of Konami not bothering to have translated the preceding 84 Goemon games into English. At any rate, anyone dopely enough to buy that shirt has surely experienced later Mario games, in which Goombas, Koopas and Shy Guys (oh my) are addressed with those names, by Mario, who then challenges them to a round of Rotate-Control-Stick or Public Domain Flash Game #46 or something like that. You hate the dog in Duck Hunt That's not really fair. Everyone who's played Duck Hunt feels some amount of resentment towards the dog. The reason most often given being "I can't shoot the dog. I want to shoot the dog." However, a true Nintendo geek knows that in the original arcade version of Duck Hunt, one can shoot the dog, has done so, and no longer feels pure hatred, either out of pity for the dog or the eventual realization that winning the game via duck homicide is more important or would be if the game had an end. You love mushrooms That might just make you a hippie. Or French. You beat the Mother Brain As a victorious confrontation with M. Brain is a stated, unnegotiable game goal, this would mean geekitude is a necessity to merely complete the game Metroid one time, which would make so many people "geeks" as to leave the label devoid of meaning. You might really be a Nintendo Geek if you beat whatever is at the end of those Zelda games on the CD-i system, which I'm told are every bit as official as the Star Wars Holiday Special. You punched out Popinsky in one round A Nintendo geek complains that Popinski was spelled incorrectly. No, actually, a geek, in bold print, complains that you didn't use the initial arcade version name "Vodka Drunkenski" (despite the arcade version's lack of "rounds." Like, doy. I hate geeks) You found all the hidden levels in the Mushroom Kingdom It's possible that just makes you a cheater. You trash talk over a game of Mario Tennis What in the name of Guthy Renker is Mario Tennis?! Isn't that a Gamecube game, like from less than three years ago? I don't know about geek, but there's a good chance you are a Nintendo dork if you've played Mario Tennis at all. You consider Excite Bike your daily exercise Hey, what's that doing here? It's actually a joke. I didn't laugh at it, but I usually don't laugh at my own, placing me into an unfortunate majority. You have an episode of Game Master on video tape Do you mean Captain N, the Game Master, or is that another one of those early 1980s Starrcadey shows that I've never heard of but that websites which haven't been updated since 1995 will swear was the best thing ever on television? If the implication is indeed Captain N, is the peculiar name briefening because there wasn't room to type "Captain N, the" or because Nintendo is ashamed of the show and doesn't want to give specific search keywords to persons who might not know about it? You boast about your high scores One of these days I'd like to meet Frenkel Ulrich Klingling, aka FUK, the person who has all the highscores on the local Arkanoid machine. Failing that, I would consider a brief e-mail correspondence with Alsandro Schmendrein Stuplevitch, regional Tumble Pop champion. You own ROB the robot and a power glove It's not enough to just own one? Interesting (the slightest bit) that "power glove" isn't capitalized but "ROB" is, or even "Shy Guys" a few lines ago. This probably has to do with power glove having been made by a non-Nintendo company, which kept whatever profits it made to itself. Interestingly, according to the wikehpedia power glove page, one of the co-designers was a confederate civil war icon. You press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, at the title screen Or you're just a cheater, again. And a misguided one, at that, since very few games overall responded to such behaviour. However, I do declare, YOU MOST CERTAINLY ARE A NINTENDO GEEK IF... you continued subscribing to Nintendo Power magazine two years after all the companies making good SNES games closed their US offices and all the coverage was devoted to mediocre N64 racing games and pointless "Super Gameboy" ports of existing SNES games rather than renounce loyalty and buy a competitor's CD system. But then, that might just mean your parents were more sensible with money. Or worse, it would make me a Nintendo Geek. So I would suffix to the end but bought a Virtual Boy the day those went on sale. (please refrain from inserting obvious Michael Jackson joke here) Actually, you might just be a Nintendo geek if you own a Virtual Boy for any reason. You either bought it new or sought it out later, even knowing of the limited amount of games / red screen. That, of course, would never make the list, because unlike ROB and power glove, which weren't technically horrible ideas but were just undersupported, Virtual Boy only has itself to blame, and also, of the three, it's the one its parent company still feels the financial sting of. And unlike the Sega CD, which, if you owned, you got to think you were truly hot stuff for a couple of months, all the Virtual Boy got you was permanent eye damage. Possibly also better developed shoulders; those things looked heavy. Such a fine print periodical as the one I mentioned managed to make me want America OnLine, yet failed at every step to sell me on this item. Note: I will place an armadillo at the top of the page later if I think of a better conclusion than this note. First of all, who's the public-validity-by-proxy grabbing crinkle-cut krippendorf at the scientology hospitarium dome who betrayed the trust of the admittedly hard-to-trust-themselves celebrities and "published" this birth certificate? And second, what exactly is the implication? That the baby is fake? That it does not exist? Why not just say that then? Otherwise, there's really no reason to be mentioning this. Suri Cruise has a weird birth certificate. JUST THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW! You might as well run a front page story about how my mother has seven toes on her right foot. In the absense of any deeper meaning, that has about as much impact on people's lives. How does it serve anyone to have a fake baby? Even if it gets them a bunch of publicity (which it has) that's not something you can keep secret forever. Even if they planned a conclusive third act to sham pregnancy '06 in which they say "oh, oh, baby is dead, please give us your sympathy and even more press," at some point there would be an investigation into the death of the baby, and with lack of evidence would either conclude that the parents are the murderers or that there never was a baby and the two of them would forever after that be national jokes, which they already are. I don't see the longterm benefit of that for people that were already Huge Stars™. The only other end has the two come forward and admit the prank, but in an antagonistic way that mocks people for following the story so closely, in which case they would be my personal heroes for at least several minutes. Like the guy who started the "get the triforce in Zelda 64" rumors. Suri Cruz is the triforce, and Compuserve can never have it. Page 44 of this. Gosh, this story really moves along, doesn't it. This is one of those pages that assured me it was "almost done" for just about half the time I spent on it. This is the most recent sign for a certain sandwich selling 'stablishment. I'm not going to bother linking to the last one for a reason which, just to spite me, may not necessarily make itself evident in the next few days. But yes, they're still spilling my soda. I guess that's the Subway way. Let the evidence show (ah, good, you did), that to eat such a sandwich, you either need a mouth capable of expanding to a height greater than the width of a standard 16 fluid ounce drink-containing cylinder, or a well enough functioning rage management system to deal with when half of the sandwich's contents spill out to the general vicinity once it has been compressed to fit your actual mouth size. Sunday, July 30, 2006 My problem already almost month solve, and I and have not received the intelligible answer. If you saw a drink with that name and description and bought a box of it, for $16 pogspammed 99, even if you ended up not liking it, I probably hate you. Feel free to bawl if I hurt your feelings. How is caffeine a selling point? It's like the liquid equivelant of fat. (if we choose to disregard the actual liquid fat my mother always ended up with a full glass of after preparing bacon). You might as well fill a syringe with high fructose corn syrup and nicotine and plunge it into your forehead. I have drunken some things with lots of caffeine in them, but never because of that caffiene, and I even began avoiding them once it started messing with my ability to urinate properly. That's like saying you enjoy skydiving because you like the way the harness looks. I suppose it's possible the desire for more caffeine comes as a protest to the prevalent warnings to be more health concious, much the same way people go out of their way to embody obnoxious American stereotypes to protest the prevalent requests to be more culturally sensitive. In other words, the people buying this for the caffeine (and I challenge you to nominate one other reason) are ignorant ne'erdogoods who hate the world. If your caffeine "addiction" is the only thing keeping you from getting drunk and throwing a car at me, then fine, don't get drunk, but don't flaunt it either, like it is some sort of attribute. You're not supposed to get drunk! That display was in a computer-related-item store. Don't you ever tell me there "isn't room" for even the most pathetic of bargain bins containing older games. If a huge stack of BAWLS (which is always, ALWAYS typed in capital letters on the official website, as in, for example, “People instantly fell in love with the refreshing, crisp taste of BAWLS”) doesn't encourage software piracy, it's only because the pirates reevaluated their cultural roots and became software vikings instead. And what's the deal with the name? Is BAWLS supposed to make me think of testicloids or excrement, and do I really want to place into my mouth something which does either?