Did I Remember to Turn the Webcam Off?

Far be it for me to ever question id Software, but Doom 3 is just too damn dark. Yes, it's moody, and yes it'll make you jump. It might even scare the shit out of you, as the promotional-videos for the game apparently had one of my friends a bit unnerved. But it's too fucking dark. Sure, that means that you never know where the monsters are going to be coming from, but it really doesn't help when you're getting the shit bludgeoned out of you and you still don't know where it's coming from. The Duct Tape Mod, courtesy of Glen Murphy, allows the shotgun and machine-gun to be used with the flashlight. Purists will say that it's on par with censoring films, like the removal of nudity from Titanic, but I see it as more along the lines of starting Titanic from the scene where Kate Winslet drops her robe and moving on from there. At least you can see what you're shooting at.

I realize that I haven't really stated an overall opinion on Doom 3, but this is because I've got a long way to go in the game, as I just now picked up the rocket-launcher. To give you some impression as to the overall mood of the game, I was playing a couple of hours ago and wasn't really having a problem with the game itself. I was just running around, checking my corners, sprinting down corridors with my chainsaw... the usual Doom stuff. My mom called me, and the vibration of my cell phone in my pocket scared the daylights out of me to the point where I nearly fell out of the chair. I mean, Christ... I thought one of those shamblers was brushing my leg, since I wouldn't put it past id Software to install some kind of Feel-Around driver in the game.

Speaking of changes in films we all know and may or may not love, I'm not sure whether or not I ever plugged Pink Five Strikes Back, which is this year's sequel to Pink Five, the Star Wars fan-film that won the George Lucas Selects award last year. The description for Pink Five Strikes Back is as follows:

The "totally awesome" saga of Stacey, the Pink Five fighter pilot continues as she treks to Dagobah, where Master Yoda trains her to be a Jedi. Kinda.

That's right, it's about a valley-girl X-Wing pilot. It's geeky as hell, and absolutely fucking hysterical, running concurrently with Empire Strikes Back. Apparently, a couple of weeks ago, Pink Five Strikes Back won the Audience Award at the Star Wars Fan-Film Festival. It's very much worth a watch, certainly on the level of Troops or any of the other classics of the genre.

I brought up Pink Five Strikes Back because I was watching a short film called Glass, and it's alright. I've seen better, and it's a far cry better than Fork, one of the other shorts over at morrisonfilm.com. In its entirety, not fantastic, but there is one moment in it that's absolutely drop-dead funny and was definitely worth linking to. I might add that the website in question also has a very good indictment of the worth of 3 Musketeers as a candy bar. The site's entertaining, so maybe one of these days, I'll link it up, but not today, since I'm lazy.

Rick James is dead, bitch. I found this shocking, as I seriously thought that he was going to be the next Keith Richards, at least in terms of his past drug-history being used to mummify himself from the inside and thereby live forever. For all of his hard-living, though, at least Rick James outlived the career of M.C. Hammer and was able to take "Super Freak" back for himself.

I've found that, in my begging for comments, that the comments are sometimes getting off-topic. Frankly, I don't find off-topic commenting cool in the least, and so I have decided to establish a fascist regime in which I will monitor future comments on the site for relevance and coherent thought and will delete those that don't fit this strict criteria. I don't think it's too much to ask.

And, I found a very nice compliment over on Fubar in the Politics forum. The topic was Celebrities Speaking Politics, and so I dug up a post I remembered from last year, in which Ben Affleck talked about that very subject, though he was speaking in regard to the then-impending war in Iraq. Affleck's post, In the Event of War, can be found here, in case you need a point of reference or out of mere curiosity. The compliment, courtesy of Mandarin, is as follows:

Umgawa, you're ten times the writer that Ben Affleck could ever hope to be. That brain-dead ass-clown couldn't even string a noun and a verb together properly when posting on the front page. You, you're eloquent and educated. You couldn't be more dissimilar.

Response from Lizzie when I told her this:

hahahhahahahaaaaaa ... he's gonna feel dumb

AIM: therbmcc71

If it's Time for Recompense for What's Done

I feel good. For the first time in ages, I feel good and I don't associate it with being a good trivia player, being someone's boyfriend or being able to write up something so clever that I sit back in my chair and call myself brilliant.

I feel inspired... like Marlon Brando after eating a gallon of shoe-polish and chasing it with a bottle of ginseng.

I feel like I'm capable of greatness again, like I haven't in years, but without the hubris that used to go along with it. It's like diet-potential, and I like it.

I feel empowered, like I don't care who rejects my job application, because it's their loss.

I feel like I finally understand the Rocky III line, "Nobody owes nobody nothin'. You owe yourself."

I feel. -no qualifier necessary-


AIM: therbmcc71

Retiring from the Game

Listen, which word don't you understand? There is no out, there is no through, there is no out!

I've been playing a trivia game at the bar for the past five years. It was a lot of fun for a long time, and now it's just started wearing on me, especially since it got to the point where any winner who isn't me gets a round of applause from the other trivia players. Me, I get whatever's one step down from cat-calls, and it just pisses me off. I'm the most reviled person at the bar, and I'm tired of being that guy. I'm tired of hearing, "Oh, shit, Mickey's here; now we're all going to lose."

So, I'm retiring Jordan-style. I mean that in regard to his first retirement, when he was still at the top of his game. Of course, then he decided he was going to take up baseball, which was certainly not a great decision by any stretch... but I don't think anyone complained but the Chicago sports fans, merchandisers and sportswriters. Within the league, it was probably seen as the end of an era, and there were probably quite a number of players who were relieved to not have to play against Michael Jordan anymore. After all, the Bulls really did suck without him. As for me, the kids can have their fucking sandbox to play in.

So I got home, feeling like complete and utter shit, from five pints of Guinness, a frosty mug of Miller Lite and a thousand years of solitude, proceeded to log into Instant Messenger and started talking to a very nice girl. "Damn, you move quick," I thought, and ultimately ended up grabbing a Vanilla Coke and heading to her place to watch (ironically) Say Anything. As it stands, she remembered that she'd already seen the movie, and so we just ended up talking for ... about four hours. And it was a great conversation, just drenched in pop-culture to the point where ninety-nine percent of humanity would think it was gibberish. We're talking about a girl who, like myself, enjoys verbally assaulting people in the most high-brow manner possible:

"Okay, of course she's not going to know those words; that girl's copy of Webster's Dictionary has Emmanuel Lewis on the cover."

So, yeah, it was like that for something on the order of four hours. Just sat across the living room from each other and talked about Buffy, movies, our respective exes, our respective penchants for using the word fuck and the necessity to curb the usage of the word to make it more emphatic when it is used. And there were muffins. Fat-free apple-cinnamon muffins are surprisingly quite tasty when drenched in Brummel and Brown margarine. The only down-side is that they stick to the muffin-paper thingies.

I feel like me again, and I don't feel like nearly as bad a person as I have over the past couple of days. We didn't drink, we didn't smoke, we didn't turn on the television. We just sat and talked for that long, and the only thing that stopped it was the fact that we were both dead-tired, at which point I hopped in my car and drove home.

Ironically, the one girl I had wanted to hear from earlier in the day called my cell phone while I was out, as I had inadverdently left it next to my computer. This, of course, means that I would have been without a phone if I had gotten lost on my way to my nice little chat tonight. But, if she had called my cell phone earlier, I don't think that I would have gone out, I wouldn't have had that conversation (or those tasty muffins), and I wouldn't have realized what was totally missing in my recent relationship.

In the post-mortem, I think that trivia was probably why I didn't see that; that I was so wrapped up in the game and thinking about the questions that I didn't realize that there was probably no way that I could have talked to her for four hours with neither interruption nor inspiration. There was just too much time sitting across a table or on cell phones, saying nothing in a neither comfortable nor uncomfortable-silence; just silence.

[Life] is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury...

Signifying nothing.

AIM: therbmcc71

EDIT: I realized a few minutes ago (eight hours after posting initially posting this) that I only got halfway through re-enabling comments, and so there they are again (although now it's gotten rid of all of the previous comments and has made every single thread commentable). I don't care; comment away, be free and happy. Me, I'm going to -rather appropriately- listen to some Fleetwood Mac.

We're No Better, Only Older

Thoughts while downloading Firefox, which I'm doing because Blogger's doing the occasional bizarre thing with Netscape:

Tragedy: dramatic genre that presents the heroic or moral struggle of an individual, culminating in his or her ultimate defeat.

I've decided that the word of the day is contrition, like Michael Corleone in Godfather III, but without all of the Catholocism and Mafia stuff. As such, I've decided that I'm going to spend the entirety of Monday in a mode of contemplation with regard to my place in the world and what kind of person I am. Pity I turned the comments off, otherwise you could just tell me.

Tyler isn't here. Tyler went away. Tyler gone.


AIM: therbmcc71

There Are Places I Remember

I've changed my mind. I'm not going to post about the DNC anytime soon. I think that I'm going to sit down and re-tool this page until it looks ... like something, rather than the New York Post style that's gotten me this far. Unless you count that horrifically ugly "Dreamsicle" episode from when I first started posting on Blogger. In any case, I'm in a rather foul mood, and -rather than let that get out into the world- I'm just going to bottle it and sell it to Krishnas in need of some really good self-loathing. "I'll hand out the fucking flowers to the people at the airport, you guys just sit down and think about your lives for just a couple of hours."

In any case, I'm playing with a scanner right now, since it's more fun to find a good picture of me than it is to break out a camera and try to take one of myself. As it stands, there's only ever been about four good pictures ever taken of me, three of which were taken either before or on my third birthday. After that, it kind of all went downhill. But I digress: In the event that you start seeing pictures of a little kid on this site, that's me from back when I was cute. Just had to say that to dispel any shades of Michael Jackson that might go through your heads.

Furthermore, I think I'm going to dump Haloscan as my commenting engine, since Blogger's has finally gotten to the point where it no longer does bizarre shit, though I don't like the whole "non-Blogger users are labeled as Anonymous," thing, so it's all up in the air right now. At the moment, though, I'm just too lazy to go and dig out the code to reinsert Haloscan capability in my page, which means no voice for my precious few readers. Given the situation that I'm in right now, this is probably a good thing, as I'm very deserving of a good blast of digital graffiti.

AIM: therbmcc71

No Comments On This Post

I've now lost two posts to the Blog-Monster, and have decided that I'm not composing posts in Blogger anymore, now that it accepts formatted copy-pasted text. My first post had an actual subject and thought behind it, the second was not unlike this one, but more extensive and explanatory as to why I chose this particular text. In this case, I'm just going to leave you with a scene from Buffy Season 5, and you can draw your own conclusions.

The scene begins with Riley and Xander talking about women.

XANDER: How is it that she can always make me feel Suave-Xander's left the building?
RILEY: You two have your friction, but she digs the whole package. It's obvious.
XANDER: Still, I do envy you sometimes. I mean for the sanity. Not that I'm still into Buffy. Not that I ever was.
RILEY: Hey, I'm well aware of how lucky I am. Like, lottery lucky. Buffy's like nobody else in the world. When I'm with her it's like ... it's like I'm split in two. Half of me is just on fire, going crazy if I'm not touching her. The other half is so still and peaceful, just perfectly content. Just knows: this is the one.
... But she doesn't love me.

EDIT: I might add that I deliberately made this post non-commentable, because I really don't want to get into a discussion about what it entails. I'm starting a completely separate blog to deal with those particular issues, and I'm not going to give that information out to ... well, anyone who doesn't ask via my AIM screenname, which is listed below, which no one ever uses; which would be pointless, given that I'm online only in the dead of night.


AIM: therbmcc71