I can't believe it. Not again.

I hope the courage is found to go back soon.

With respect.

Since I've been spending a lot of time waiting for things to load, writing down fatal errors, and waiting for consoles to reset, I've been spending a lot of time poking around on the net, and trying to find a few new blogs to read. One which I've discovered and have found much to my liking is Maddog, which features long articles pontificating on user interface, language structure, and various other subjects.

I especially like the lyrics he wrote for My Heart Does Not Love You.

I am notoriously rational and full of disclaimers, even when it comes to expressing affection. I like to think that my clinicalness is sort of poetic, in a way, but I just feel funny telling someone something that isn't totally empirically proveable. For instance, I will often add the disclaimer "Unless something terribly unforeseen happens." to casual phrases such as "See you later!" or "I'll be there soon!"

So I can't very well tell someone that I really care about things that simply aren't true. I don't run around telling people that I would give them all the stars if I could reach them, or that I would climb the highest mountain, or that I would walk 500 miles and then 500 more for them. My ex-girlfriend would tell me that she loved me with all her heart. I could never return the same sentiment, for though I loved her, I knew, rationally speaking, that my heart does not determine my emotional state. So I would generally reply that I loved her with my brain, or more often, "I love you with all of whatever it is I do my loving with.", which sounds kind of dirty in retrospect.

1moredork Book Reviews - "Find Your Fate... Junior - The Transformers: Battle Drive"
Barbara and Scott Siegel
Random House Press 1985
$1.95


This Find Your Fate... Junior book series is a derivative of the Choose Your Own Adventure line of youth literature. If there's one impression that Choose Your Own Adventure books left with me, it's that every decision I make is extremely important so don't fuck up. One simple dilemma is all that stand between one choosing to walk down street A and making it home safely, or walking down street B and ending up kidnapped by skinhead death cultists.

But at least one only had to worry about oneself in those books. This book takes it a step further by giving the reader the great responsibility of choosing the path of the entire Autobot army. The book also makes it very clear that this is an extremely grave responsibility. From the tagline of "Only YOU can help the Autobots defeat the Decepticons' evil plan!!!" to any of the endings, the book does not sugarcoat the fact that, ultimately, the blame lies with you if anything goes wrong.

The plot starts with the Decepticons planning to destroy all of the world's crops, thus killing off all of the humans, and thus being able to defeat the Autobots since they won't have human help any more. This doesn't seem particularly bright, since the humans mostly helped Megatron and Co. by providing a handy escape route for the Decepticons if they decided to appeal to the Autobot's foolish altruism ("You could stay here and destroy me, Optimus, but you would never dare fire your laser pistol in a crowded mall! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!"). Man, if I were an Autobot, I wouldn't spend any energy on humans. All they do is run around and scream. What have they ever done to help the Autobots? Fuckin' humans.

Oh anyways... about the book:

Consider the following possible end sequence:

"The choice you made doomed yourself and the rest of mankind to going to bed (forever) without dinner... or breakfast... or lunch... or anything"

Great, I killed off the entire world. No pressure.

Here's my personal favorite:

"The Autobots get creamed! Have you ever had Cream of Autobot?
No?
Well, you start by makign a choice that puts Optimus Prime and his friends in plenty of hot water. Add abotu a zillion Decepticons that want to grind the Autobots into a melted mess... then let the Autobots boil under all that Decepticon fire power- and there you hvae it: Cream of Autobot. It doesn't taste very good, but then, defeat always leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
Maybe next time you make the choices that lead to teh sweet taste of victory."

I just had to type that out when I was copying it, and even I could feel how wrong a paragraph that was, liek teh keys themselves were fighting that particular sequence of words. Jeez!

And then it goes on to further mess around with the poor reader's head. At one point the reader is given the option to write a message on the page to warn the Autobots of an upcoming ambush. Afte turning to page 35, the reader learns that the Autobots ignored your message, thinking it to be a Decepticon trap, and ironically are killed by a Decepticon trap because they ignored it. The message here: Nobody trusts you, and all your efforts will be for naught.

The line between fantasy and reality is further blurred by having the narrative jump outside this book.

"That crash you heard wasn't made by Prowl or the Decepticon attack. It was made by you, falling out of bed! You must have drifted off to sleep while you were reading. But if this is all a dream, what are you doing in this book, wearing your pajamas?"

The scary part is, I i was falling asleep in my pajamas! Now that put the fear of God into me, I tell you what!

What the hell kind of a mind-fuck is that to put on a poor little kid? Now they're going to believe this book has omnipotent powers and really does give them some sort of magical ability to direct the actions of a robot force in a another dimension. I sure believed it, and I think I'm odler than the target demographic for the Find Your Fate...Junior series of books

Not only that, it is hard! I killed Optimus and his posse 5 times before I got a remotely positive ending. The reason for this is that the decision you make are presented with totally ridiculous false dilemmas which some completely arbitrary. In one instance, standing and fighting as opposed to running to get help results in a victory. In another, it results in painful death. Going through this book is based on blind luck and not rational risk assessment.

I'm surprised that Hasbro green-lighted giving the Transformers license to this series in general and these authors in particular. I'm willing to bet that Barbara and Scott Siegel are a mother-son book-making team, with her doing the writing, and him doing the illustrations. I reckon his age to be about 8 from the drawing quality. Not to mention the fact that it breads so many aspect of the Transformers canon. For instance, in one story path Swoop destroys Megatron, which anyone who bothered to look at their respective stat cards could see would be, like, totally impossible.

The lesson I came away with from reading this is that every decision I make is life-or-death, that I can never tell what is the right decison to make, and that eventually the chances are that I will fuck up big time, but if I have the gumption and perserverance and total faith in myself, even I can get my crappy fan-fiction published.

Well, If you want a book that will give your children an enormous guilt complex, extreme paranoia, and a shaky grip on reality, but want to take a more secular path than the Bible, than Battle Drive is perfect for you.

Well, I suppose you're all expecting me to tell you how I feel about our fearless leader's State of the Union Address. Hang on a moment..

hnnnnn.... ahhh.... wait a sec....

nnnn... hang on... nnnn....

*pant* *pant*... nffff.... rrrhhh..... okay... here we go....nnn... almost there...

....nnnnNNNNNNNNAAAAahhhhhh!!

*bloop*

I swear they should have me give the opposing party's response to the speech next year.

Crap, I just was going over the winners of the Anti-Bloggies from the past two years and discovered that they already have a category for Best Heterosexual Weblog, obviously having noticed the blatant discrimination happening right now at the Bloggies. Since discovering this, I feel 85% less original and funny and clever. Just goes to show how important research is. I will now retreat into the mountains to perform some much-needed comedy meditaion. I've got my mantra all figured out.

"nyuk nyuk nyuk.... nyuk nyuk nyuk.... nyuk nyuk nyuk..."

Okay guys, so like, wow. I took this How Punk Are You? quiz over at MSN Kidz, and it turns out I'm a certified card-carrying punk! That's so cool! And 74% of the people who took that survey got the same score as me! I'm so glad I'm a punk just like 74% of the people who take quizzes at MSN Kidz! I was worried about my punk-ness for a while there.

Personal records:

Longest ever work week - 80 hours
Longest work day - 18 hours
Latest at work - 3:00 AM

As of right now.

Fucking hell.

I've got it, the perfect sequel to Joe Millionaire: Joe Twelve Inches.

My co-workers were discussing how glad they were that some Al-Quaida-linked terror suspects had been apprehended in Spain. One of them commented that it most likely had been due to government officials secretly reading people's e-mail. I asked if he was okay with that, and he replied that as long as it catches terror suspects, he didn't mind Uncle Sam peeking at his e-mails. "If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide!", he said.

"Everybody has something to hide.", I told him. I believe this to be true. I find people's complacency with such blatant privacy invasion to be profoundly disturbing.

Although I find the idea of some poor CIA workers digging through and examining every single piece of suspect e-mail patently ridiculous, I have determined a system which will allow me to send e-mails freely without fear of them being read by unintended third parties. So, just to give you all advance notice, from now on, all my subject lines will read: "*|)eep Thr0ats* - 1000+ 0raL Vide0 Cl|ps".

Here I am at work on Super Bowl Sunday. That's fine with me.

Ami came down to visit me this weekend, so my mood has improved considerably. Most everyone at work was taking today off to watch the game, and I didn't particularly care for this plan since I could care less about the Superbowl and Ami was leaving Sunday, so I'd rather have had Saturday off so that I could spend it with her. Fortunately, I managed to finagle my way into doing just that, so I'm working today, and my wo-workers are gonna have to scome in after the game anyway. Nyuk! 'Course, that means I'll probably have to stay late tonight, but whatever.

Yesterday Ami and I went off to Long Beach to see the Queen Mary, specifically the Ghost and Legends of the Queen Mary tour, which was way cheesier and cooler than I had expected. The thing about amusement facilities in Southern California is that there are a lot more aspiring actors down here, so any sort of thematic tour guide really takes his of her job a lot more seriously. So our tour guide was into it, and it was very fun. This little kid on the tour was not into it, though and cried pretty much the entire time. I don't blame him, every time we reached a site of paranormal significance, we actually saw spectral shit happening! Like the lights went out, and there were crazy lights and stuff moved around and everything. What are the chances? And some people say there is no such thing as ghosts, pah!

Ami and I also managed to make it to the Crystal Cathedral, home of the Hour of Power television program. Wow, that place is really something. From the sample family burial plots, to the graven images of Dr. Robert Schuller to the statues of biblical VIPs (Moses even has a permanently burning bush!) this place really embodies some of the most appaling aspects of modern Christianity. Fortunately, it seemed very poorly patrolled, so we were allowed to move about and mock everything with a fair amount of freedom. I'd really love for Jesus to return some day and make his first stop the Crystal Cathedral. He could just bust in during the Hour of Power and yell, "What the Hell is this? Did you people even read my word? You just don't get it, do you?!" and then bombard the whole thing with meteors. That would be awesome. Jesus kicks ass.

So as far as the Superbowl itself goes: I hope the Raiders win, because otherwise I think their fans will riot and destroy San Diego utterly. Of course, that might still happen if the Raiders win. As much as I hate to make sweeping generalizations about Raiders Fans, the fact remains that they are all insane and want to kill you.

So, as you may have surmised, I'm not a big pro football, or big pro any sport fan. Call me crazy, but I don't really car to invest a whole lot of my emotional energy into the outcome of a bunch of burly strangers tossing a ball around. And I'm certainly not oging to spend money on such a thing. Do you know how much cash I save each year by not giving a rat's ass about pro sports? $12,500. It's true, I did the math.

This is not to say I don't have appreciation for sports. Sports are totally fun. Watching sports, however, is dull. Call me crazy, but I'd rather actually play football than sit on a couch and watch other people play it. Now, when Mutant League Football becomes a reality, then you can count me in.