Somehow it seems very appropriate that the collective weed-smoking comunity has chosen "420" as a big numerical inside joke, but seems to have forgotten exactly where it originated.

Today: So bored I'm reading Moby's journal. It's tough to believe that the same guy who composed "We Are All Made of Stars" gets homesick and wishes for Chinese food and bitches about beds being too hard and wonders why cocks are called "cocks" when they don't look anything like roosters. It's a blog like any other, but it's Moby. Celebrities really are humans. Crap.

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Jam Master Jay, of all people. They couldn't have shot somebody mean or untalented instead. Or better yet, no one. Fuck. Jam Master Jay.

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One day I will pick up the newspaper and the headlines will tell me the Madonna has died.

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I received a copy of my first title on which I was assistant lead tester today. It's for GameCube, so I'm never going to play it. Boy, GameCube boxes are such a waste of packagin. The disc is as small as a CD single (Remember those? Of course you do.), and nobody seriously uses this little extra clips for storing memory cards. What, like they have a separate memory card for eveyr game? I doubt that. Then there's another bunch of clips along the side that I guess could hold a pen or pencil. All in all, there's more than twice as much packaging as there need be. Probably because they just want the pakcage to fit DVD shelves.

In fact, Nintendo really performed dumbness with making their discs smaller than regular DVDs/CDs. They're so terrified of piracy that they use a non-standard format, which means their Cube cannot play DVDs or CDs as the competition does, they hold far less data, and they won't fit in someone's CD carry-case well. I digress, it's all been said before.

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I'm trying to choke down black cofee at work so I get a taste for it. It's not working. Why don't they just give me caffienated water, or caffiene pills? Or sell Jolt?

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It's pretty sad when you can't make it through a day of work without some kind of chemical stimulant or other.

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The other smokers here do not appreciate the fact that I only smoke about one cigarette a week.

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Someone should make caffienated cigarettes.

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Halloween pictures and remarks up soon, maybe.

It seems like a bad sign when one's company blocks access to fuckedcompany.com, craigslist.org and hotjobs.com.

Video game 420 references:

• In the opening cinema for Sly Cooper and the Theivius Raccoonus, the place is given as Paris, France, and the time is given as 4:20 am.
  
• On the Tokyo level of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, a digital clock stopped at 4:20 can be seen near the top of the level.
  
• In Halo, the max amount of rounds for the assault rifle is 600. In multiplayer modes, one starts with 180 rounds, thus one will oftten pick up a defeated enemies ammunition and receive the message: "You got 420 rounds for assault rifle".
  
• In Warcraft 3, foot soldiers have 420 HP.

Any others out there? Probably. Not that I've seen, though. The last two are probably just coincidences, but I'll share with you an interesting e-mail I got from an unnamed representeative at an unnamed company which he received from an unnamed tech support representive at a company which is to remain unnamed, but could very easily be figured out. (By the way, EULA stands for End-User License Agreement)

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Subject: about the information guides that comes with WC3

is there a clause in your EULA that prohibits the use of the accompanying
manuals for rolling a joint on???
i would like to know in order to take appropriate measures before i make my
joint.
please answer hastily as this is cruscial for my everyday good feeling

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Study Faults Bolts in WTC Collapse

Hmmmm... I really don't think I can fault the designers for not designing the towers to withstand having two fucking passenger airliners flown into them.

"A study by a Manhattan engineering firm said damage caused by the planes, and fires that broke out as a result, caused both buildings to crumble during the terrorist attacks. "

Now there's something I could never have guessed. I want one of those "Research the painfully obvious" research grants for figuring out that teens are socially inept or that smoking causes cancer or something.

A movie about a haunted VHS tape should not be genuinely scary. A haunted Vhs tape... that's stupid, it's a VHS tape. Everyone has VHS tapes lying around. That's like making a movie about a demonic spoon, but it worked. Leave it to Japan to come up with a concept that sounds ridiculous and give it a fantastic execution.

So yeah, I am now having difficulty walking through a dark hallway to go to the bathroom at night thanks to The Ring, and not so much scattered plastic toys as usual, and although I'm not really afraid of VHS tapes in general, the one in the movie now makes me look askance at the television in my living room, and if it turned on by itself, I'm not ashamed to admit that I will shit myself.

But this is stupid, of course. It's a television. Everyone's got a television. Demons are supposed to reside in things like statues and musty books bound in human flesh, not collections of wires and circuitry. But if I look at some of the horror films that have been put out over the years, it's apparent that even more mundane items are not safe from supernatural powers. Terrorvision made me afraid of TV for a while (I was like, 8, okay?!), the VHS box for Ghoulies gave me the willies every time I needed to sit on a toilet, after I saw Electric Dreams I I never drank champange at my keyboard again, and who wasn't scared to don a Halloween mask after viewing Halloween 3: Season of the witch? (Probably everyone, but I digress.)

Does it have something to do with the age of the technology in question? It is widely believed that demons, vampires, athiests and other unholy beasts can be deterred by waving a bible at them. What about waving bible software? How old does a technology have to be before we can attribute some degree of supernaturalness to it? Books, mirrors, swords and flutes are all technologies that were new at one point, but now can be thought to be imbued with demonic or holy powers. Why not DVDs, camcorders, submachineguns or iPods? A friend of mine once had a haunted answering machine, ghost voices frequently show up on tape recordings of otherwise silent rooms, and the same goes for photos in which dead folks routinely appear.

Maybe it's related to how much we take the technology in question for granted, or how much we understand it. In The Ring, the offending videotape is copied, analyzed, and put through the wriner in all manner. One video tape expert expresses concern that the timecode on the copy of the tape still doesn't read properly, and goes into an educate-the-audience lecture about how timecode is stored on a different track. Now, I used to work with all sorts of magnetic media in my digital video class (I even used the same model of professional tape deck shown in the move>) and so I have a pretty good understanding of the meduim, so it freaked me out even more. I thought to myself, "Once you black and timecode a tape, it doesn't matter what you put on the video or audio tracks! They're independently stored! That is so spooky!" Not to mention the part where the investigator pushes the tracking so far off that she sees a lighthouse beyond the right edge of the frame. The image should just wrap around to the left edge, but I guess demons have the power to circumvent NTSC standards. I wonder if it would still be deadly if it were converted to pal.

Do powers of any sort really give a crap about the medium in which they are stored? For instance, if someone copies the killer VHS tape from The Ring onto DVD, will it still kill viewers in seven days? What about MPEG-encoding the video and sending it out over Kazaa? Now that would be one busy demon if it still worked. Of course speaking aloud from the Necronomicon will generate all manner of nasty beasties, but apparently playing back a reel-to-reel recording (Ash, you dumbass) of someone speaking aloud from the Necronomicon will suffice, according to Evil Dead 2. I guess the message of evil is more important than the media. Evil knows no copyright protection scheme.

With the technology subject to demonic possession in films updated effectively to VHS, I suppose that in the future we can expect to see it taken even further, perhaps cartridge based gaming, ("If you die in the game... you will die!"), chain e-mails, ("Send this to 10 of yoru friends or else... you will DIE! Seriously!") and the internet ("This summer, double-click on death! Once the progress bar reaches 100% You will be 100% dead!!!"). It seems strange, since technology and the occult seem to be pretty diametric, but just to be safe, I'm carrying a degausser with me everywhere I go.

Oh, and if my girlfriend tells you that I practically peed 'em everytime somebody so much as coughed after leaving the theater, she's totally lying.

(As an interesting aside, the protagonist in The Ring uses a web search engine to research the images displayed in the VHS tape, and types "Anna Morgan" in to find information about a ranch where strange events took place. If one types "Anna Morgan" into Google, the first match is a web page about the fictitious ranch, presented, Blair-WItch-style, as though it were an actual place. Love that multimedia marketing, yeah!)