It's still a FirstPersonShooter, which I still hate. But it's also a fairly simple puzzlegame with some amusing oneliners; so it's kinda fun too. And of course that meaningless the cake is a lie thing I'd forgotten all about after it stopped being memetic makes sense now:

I wasn't near my DigiCam while playing the game: hence the PhoneCam mess.

So I've gone through the game a few times now, also going back and getting the Advanced versions of the six intermediate levels. Ordinarily, I ignore manipulations trying to coax me into getting XBox achievements, especially if they're not good for anything [in DeadRising, they at least lead to things like the MegaBlaster]; but I've actually been trying to kill every killable camera in this thing, and, every damned time, I get all but one of them. I'm not sure which one I keep missing, or even if it's always the same one. Maybe I'll give up and look for a walkthrough if I don't get it next time. I did get the Terminal Velocity thing for freefalling thirty thousand feet, if only by setting up the portals and leaving for dinner before coming back four hours later; I'm still working on the longjump thing though: the chick always makes it through about a dozen portals before grabbing an edge. Also of course I'm missing the Bronze, Silver, and Gold achievements, since I'm in no hurry to play through each level for best time, least portals, and whatever else; it's just not my thing.

So, I played the game, beat it, and...I could probably move on now; but it is actually pretty fun. Hunter kinda likes hearing it, so long as she doesn't have to look at the screen ['Did the sentrygun really just sing "I don't hate you"?'], but she gets dizzy just watching me play it, which is sort of a pity.

I haven't looked at TeamDumbass2 yet, apart from a trailer I'd downloaded before the game was released. Maybe I'll look at it today, since I accidentally own that game along with Portal and the various episodes of HL2; if there's more to it than leaping around killing and getting killed—the whole lack of point to the first one—I might be okay with it; that it's a total cartoon might also make it better, the original being oddly uppity about trying to look like a real wargame.

Oh. Also, I worked out why at least some of the people telling me to play Portal wanted me to see it: it's all about the portable holes from the S97S. So, yeah: it's kinda neat to see those in application, even if there's no mesphotical transition between holes [to be real, even I'm not sure what the Mesphos looks like; and I invented the damned thing]; though, playing the game has got me thinking a bit about all that again—if the S97S ever got filmed somehow, given the technology these days, it would probably be purely CG [if more Beowulf than anything Pixar end up making] and, in a perfect world, voiced mostly by the bases for the characters themselves. Just because that would be really cool. Though the 'badguys' [everyone in the S97S is a badguy, but the good ones are in competition against the Forces of Dimness] were people I couldn't stand at the time, so I wouldn't go looking for them, even if they'd be likely to go for the idea of being themselves in a context where it's evident that no one likes them.

I guess I'll go look at TeamDumbass for a bit. If it doesn't suck like the first one, I might have more to talk about here later. Of course, eventually, I should have more to talk about here; hence: more later....

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Actually, I did some things; I just didn't run over here to mention them. But, mostly, I just kinda took a month off again.

Mostly, I've been playing videogames, really. Or wandering out to get new ones. And, in cases, old ones. So I've got a decent list of stuff to kindasorta review, most of it outdated in the world.

I've already mentioned the hell outta DeadRising; but, that being as close to the perfect game as I've ever seen, I can probably keep going on about it. In fact, let's talk about complaints, since I've got a few of those.

For one thing, I've got something like 12.5million points on it now. Which is annoying enough. I was never too thrilled with games measuring points, even when that's all they did [Asteroids couldn't even be paused; the only milestone in that thing was looping the hitcounter after whatever it maxed out with—999999, or something]. But, while I've got 12.5million points, I'm still not showing up in the leaderboards, though I should be in the top two hundred now. So I don't quite get that. Unless, for some goofy reason, I'm not showing up where I should be on my machine; I see the guy with a couple hundred thousand more points than I've got just above the guy with a couple hundred thousand points less; my score isn't there, let alone my username, which on XBox Live is Wasted Inc. If someone else has the game and can see me there [at the moment, I think I should be at something like 130], let me know about it, I guess.

As for gameplay: if I were to make a game, and we'll assume for likelihood that I'd do a zombiegame [what are the odds], it would be a lot like this one already is. With a couple exceptions, which happen to be most of my complaints. First [and the game does kinda address this, in the penultimate ending], getting bit once would Fester'sQuest your ass back to the beginning. Even granting the type of zombie seen in the game, I have doubts that zombification could be quelled at the onset by orangejuice and wine; I just don't buy it. A zombie bites you and, bestcase, you should start dying, possibly with your healthblocks depleting profusely, regardless your actions. Which of course will come up again in a minute, under a different complaint.

On a related note, first: I hate levelbosses. I even hate the term. Partly because it's a misnomer. And I say that given my history as a boss. In any given circumstance, the boss is invariably a feckless moron; if he weren't, he wouldn't really need employees. In this game especially, they guy's not the boss because he didn't hire all the zombies. Even in more related cases, like ResidentEvil3, Nemesis isn't quite the boss, since he's out there killing more zombies than you're likely to get in a single strike. But that's all kinda semantic. What annoys me here is that, in the middle of slaughtering the undead, you run into these laughably immortal morons [okay: Carlito would in a sense be a boss, thinking about it; what he wouldn't be is able to turn and return fire after being hit by anything less than the MegaMan blaster] which have almost nothing to do with anything, except that they've been somehow emboldened by the outbreak to suck as no man has sucked before. And that's just talking about the psychopaths you've got to kill in order to beat the first game: Carlito, that gotarded butcher, and whatever. About the time I had to hit a guy, presumably in 2006, when the game was released, who was having VietNam flashbacks, being therefore, say, sixtysomething, with that MegaMan cheat three or four times, I was convinced that no game I'd make would have these idiots.

I'm almost okay with the SAS invading at the end. Officially, they're SpecialForces; but the uniforms are pure SAS. Though, all things considered, I'd expect some of them, eventually, to become zombified, and harder to kill than the hardhat zombies with the bulletproofed heads. Each of these guys, which tend to appear in clusters of ten or more, is as hard to kill as Carlito in his first appearance in the foodcourt, which is annoying since their primary objective is ultimately to make you dead. At the least, I'm not sure I'd put them in a game, able to take half a magazine from a CAR15, but easily sliced in half by a katana; it's just weird.

As much fun as the cars are, I have to wonder how they got there [I won't even bother asking why they're all sitting there idling for seventy-two hours or more]: I've driven every centimetre of the gamespace, and never found a place they could have driven through to get in at all. Just to get things making sense, there should at minimum be an unbreakable gate somewhere they all coulda driven through before things got locked down. Better still, the town obviously being finished enough to support that boring and optional opening with the DigiCam and the helicopter, I'd want to be able to get out into the streets of Willamette, even if the car got shelled by howitzers every time it neared the roadblocks. Just something to think about. And one more thing, thinking about both cars and levelbosses: is it a glitch that I can kill all three convicts, empty their gattlinggun, and wreck their HMMVW, only to have it respawn the instant I go inside and come back out? Because that's just unfair.

The endgame is really annoying. I'm okay with carrying that idiot though the tunnel, even if there's ultimately no point to it [this is the same bitch trying to kill you from a motorbike a couple days earlier, after all]; but, to get through all that, only to run into more SAS, only to kill those and steal a Jeep, only to have to kill a tank with bulletproofed treads, only to have to kill a guy eight feet tall who magically made all your weapons and health disappear...this isn't a zombiegame anymore: it's StreetFighter; and I hate Streetfighter.

So, let's get beyond that idiocy to get the True Ending, in which Frank West has killed the entire SAS and finds himself sitting on a broken tank with another 53,594 zombies [the population of Willamette, and the number of zombies you've got to kill in order to get the MegaBlaster thing] learning to climb, yet he somehow survives to get the story out to the world; I dunno. That actually being the end of Overtime Mode, I've now got the optional Infinite Mode, which is badly misnamed.

It's not a sandbox mode, as much as it should be. It doesn't give you anything useful, like immortality or infinite ammo. It just starts you off from the beginning, without a way to save, with the profusely depleting healthbars I'd have been okay with as a way to illustrate that getting bit by a zombie was ultimately a death sentence. But it's not about that. It's about staying alive for as long as possible, up to, including, and beyond the seventhday achievement which, a minute in the game being six seconds in realtime, is fourteen hours of not dying while not saving while not finding a lot of food to replenish the draining healthmeter. It's actually really boring; I think I made it to about five hours before getting killed and deciding that it wasn't a game I wanted to play.

So. That's that. Decent game in general—roughly the best I've seen—for the first seventy-two hours; a bit annoying for the penultimate twenty-four; tragically pointless for the 168 hours or more in the special Infinitely Irksome Mode unlocked by killing the guy who used to beat up Xerxes from 300 before invading SouthPark. There's infinite replay value to it, just not in the mode named for the concept.

Other games....

Here's one no one expected me to consider, let alone buy, let alone do well at: SimBrothel. You may know it as VivaPinata if you haven't played it yet. Simplish game: the whole deal is building gardens and attracting and getting to mate increasingly difficult animals, all being pinatas. It's been a couple weeks since I last played it, but I'd hatched and grown the dragonache [which I naturally renamed from Dragonache1 to Poof the Magic Dragon; you'd agree if you saw the thing] and got an elephanilla to move in; there's not much left to do with it, according to the Achievements Screen, but it's an amusing timekiller and headachecauser.

DutifulKalamari. Possibly better known as BeautifulKatamari. A fairly cool game—really more Hunter's thing—in which an unambiguous pillowbiter tells you to go out and roll stuff up until your katamari is half a metre in diameter, a couple meters, or, by the end, approaching parsecs. Which of course is all that counts: once you've beat a level well enough, you can go back and play in Infinite Mode—this time meaning what it says—rolling stuff up without a timelimit, from thumbtacks and cars to continents, planets, and the sun. Total timekiller, but fun; even if being in the room with it actively turns you gay.

Stubbs the Zombie. The backwards compatability is still underway, but the XBox360Elite [and I assume the less black models] can play various XBoxSpaceHeater games, including this one. What it can't do, apparently, is get it to look right on an HDTV; it's letterboxed on the sides, which bugs me. Otherwise, it's a funnish, occasionally inspired satire: at about the time Indiana Jones was looking for the Crystal Skull, Pleasantville [or whatever the town's actually called] was a retropolitan eutopia in which people are every bit as stupid and gullible in the fifties as reported in Back to the Future, and in which Edward 'Stubbs' Stubblefield returns from the dead as a zombie, hellbent on killing and zombifying anyone and everyone, all for reasons disclosed as the game progresses. Bit of a timekiller with some slight difficulties and some really funny bitgags, from posters in the copshop [Friendly Fire! Remember: Shoot People, Not Cops!] to cinematic spoofs [Stubbs addressing the newly zombified Quakerstate Irregulars from before a massive American Flag, Patton's helmet and all: 'Brains. Brains, brains brains. Brains; brains, brains; brains.'] It's not DeadRising; but it was never meant to be. Also, the subtitle, Rebel without a Pulse, while bothersome [I'd already used that somewhere], might indicate a second game sometime; and I'd probably pick that up as instantly as I picked up Destroy All Humans 2.

The Thing. I may have mentioned at some point [I'm pretty sure I had Bennigan talking about it in Paroxysm] that the sequel to the film was functionally a game released twenty years later, six years ago. In any case, while I've got it for the PS2, I grabbed it for the XBox, since the 360 can play it, a couple days ago; the only differences between the two versions, really, are that there are no cheatcodes for the XBox, and the loadingscreens the PS2 trudged through for ninety seconds each take about three seconds on the new machine. So it's both more and less annoying, and still fairly fun to play.

The Orange Box. Kinda like with Destroy All Humans 2, I grabbed HL2.0 the day it came out. I can't stand FirstPersonShooters [no peripheral vision, that weird state of floating above clipping errors without seeing your feet], but HalfLife was curiously fun anyway. Of course, the real fun was always hacking in noclip and impulse_101 in the Wintel versions, which can't be done with the XBox [that I've noticed, anyway], so playing through without cheats is a process: I picked it up the other day along with The Thing and I've just got over the railroad tracks to whichever roadblock I was too tired by then to remember before I shut it all down. It's been a while since I played the Wintel original, but I think I'm maybe halfway through 2.0 now; can't wait to see what 2.1 is; and everyone keeps telling me I'd love Portal, which I haven't even looked at screenshots for yet—that'll probably be something to come back and talk about later....

LegoStarWars and LegoIndy. I'd had both StarWars games for the GameCube; but, the ability to go through all six films with one disc, pulling in characters I couldn't pull in before, made it worth it to grab the new version. Indy, weirdly enough, is just the first three films, though the fourth came out a couple weeks after the game did. The two are vastly different, yet oddly similar—being Legos. Also, they're just fun. Especially the part where they're almost necessarily twoplayer, and Hunter's able to play them; she can't handle games like HalfLife and ResidentEvil, especially on an HDTV, without getting vertigo, at best. Technically, she's thirty-two thousand points into DeadRising, on her account, and she can handle GrandTheftAuto; though she tends to go find some other room in the house while I'm killing zombies in a mall, if only because I keep shouting 'Don't touch me! Damnit! Stupid fucking zombies!' at the screen. Which is probably fair. You should see me in real malls, with real zombies consumers, toward the end of the calendar year....

I've got another couple dozen games for the XBox now, new and old; some of them are still sitting there unopened, to be honest. So, whatever I'm forgetting to mention, and whatever I've forgotten to play yet, I'll probably get to them eventually.

In other news, as you might guess, I'm not really any further along with Lurkers [that's a novel I'm writing, not a game I'm playing] than I was whenever I uploaded the last teaser bit. Partly because, in fact, I am further along, in the sense that I've backed away from it to work out what exactly the thing is about. Obviously, it's about a guy not much unlike me in a restaurant overnight, loosely based on the filmscript I wrote ten years ago, updated to August 2009...and that's kinda what I've got; I'm trying to decide whether to make it realistic and possibly boring, or arguably interesting but batshit unlikely; the original was more batshit, possibly because I was still writing the S97S at the time. In a way, I'd like to get back to that sort of thing, since it's way more fun to write; it might be more fun to read, too. In another way, I can't read a book or watch a film or play a game anymore without catching intrusive technical errors and focussing on those instead of letting them be fun; so, writing a book with intentionally implanted weirdness is something I'm not really in the habit of doing anymore. At least, not on purpose. And I'm never thrilled when I find an accidental one, especially after it's got an ISBN and gone to press. But that's me. Which is why Hunter's been watching me while I sleep, fondling a knife from the doorway; she doesn't think I know, but I know....

Okay: I don't know. But, it's Hunter: so I'm probably right.

See? Pedantic. She'll probably stab me for that.

Anyway: more later....

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So I took the cane. And the skateboard.

Hunter kinda filmed me rowing the thing with the cane, in infrared, which didn't work out all that well after all:

Maybe I'll try that again during the day. And maybe she'll be close enough to film it correctly. Never know....

And, yeah: Swyndle did this one first, around 1995. But I figured it was about that time again.

Also, since Hunter's camera hasn't got infrared, she's having a lot of fun with mine in the dark:

More later....

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Anyway. The generally known bit—what a number of people saw firsthand, far more have seen since, and a number of people have saved, cloned, and preserved—involves whatshispsychosis...uh...you never remember the boring ones...hang on....

It was ooso.reticuli: a sort of middlemanagement conspiratard which initially trolled its way into an established topic [well, I was asking meaningless questions regarding mythology; like: if souls reportedly weigh 21g, and foeti on average weigh less than that, is it therefore okay after all to abort them] by taking dramatic offence to my idea that, all selfproclaimed abductees being crazy, maybe the aliens simply weren't throwing back the sane ones. Which led quickly to the gotard whimpering that, by calling all returned adbuctees crazy, I personally with all my uberdeital power on the planet was discouraging the sane ones, of which none is known to exist, from coming forward and releasing the caged and angry truth. About, you know, the aliens. Of which also none is known to exist.

Enter the evidence. Now the gotard has conclusive proof that aliens are real, mostly in the form of a muppet being illumintated hastily by a torch while the, uh, telepath communicating with it had paused to figure out why that hadn't been working, or something. On learning that the alien was a muppet, the gotard pulled back, admitted that, yeah, that one was fake; but this other muppet, with anamatronic innards, was unfake. Until it too proved fake, and the gotard decided that it had been joking about the whole thing.

It went to gotards.com for that.

Here's where things get amazing. In telling the gotard that its muppets were fake, for the benefit of everyone not paying much attention to it, I distilled its whole argument to the sequence we'd seen: Aliens Are Invading; Here's Proof; That Proof Was Fake; Search for Real Proof; Therefore, Aliens Are Invading which, itself being the synopsis, I also used for the section's title at gotards.com, as you'll probably have noticed by now.

It went batshit. Whimpering that I'd misquoted it while maintaining that I'd quoted it verbatim, neither point actually being true; if I quote someone, I use quotes; it's this habit I developed while learning English. But, the damage is done. Meaning functionally that the idea is in the gotard's head now, leaving no room for other ideas. It can't be bothered to grok that a title isn't a quote [anyone ever actually heard me say 'gremlin dot net'? I never do. I tend to call this place 'gremlin net', since it sounds better somehow]; it can however be bothered to demand fecklessly that I go back and change the title to a quote [I guess] of its own misspelling. I didn't. Though I did eventually mention that, if it weren't a fucking idiot, it could go change the title. Which, yeah: was kinda insidious; you'll see that in a minute.

It goes off to change the title, I guess; no one really noticed that it had left, since we were all talking about more interesting things by then. I can't remember what they were; but they were apparently more interesting, or we wouldn't have been talking about them. Then it trolls back to apologise braggingly that, while trying to fix the title, it had accidentally performed a totally separate function and erased the entire entry. I told it that wasn't a problem.

I hopped over to gotards.com, reverted the gotard's deletion to the version I'd posted, locked out changes to anyone but, well, me, clipboarded the gotard's IP Address now that it had WebTwoPointOhNoed what amounted to its home address, name, phone number, et cetera into my database, and pasted it into the room with that explanation. For reference, now that this is a legal matter I feel inclined to report, its IP is 75.73.21.132

Incidentally, its next lie was reporting that its IP was a proxy. Then it poofed again. Or, possibly also, it disappeared. Until, after a while, I mentioned wondering what had happened to it. And here's the reply:

3:55:49 PM ooso.reticuli: No I'm just deleting every entry I can

So I banned its IP which, being not a proxy, couldn't be dropped in favour of a different one. Which gave it a different idea:

4:06:23 PM ooso.reticuli: Right, and now I'm going to delete your whole site.
4:06:33 PM ooso.reticuli: And if you back it up again I will dns attack your server

Welcome to the wonderful world of federal crimes.

The rest was pretty much the gotard not successfully DDoSsing the server, which incidentally is part of the fourth largest serverbank in existence, which if the 'tard attacked it would pretty well autotrigger a trap, trace, and warrant for the FBI to noknock Mom's door on the way to the basement and incarcerate this idiot. Which, for all I know, has already happened. Just for those wondering now whether the server, along with about ten percent of all websites online, might suddenly disappear: not a chance.

In other news....

So, that thing where I'm supposed to be writing a play hit a snag. It's a logistical thing. I'm okay with plotting out the whole thing; I do that it LightWave all the time. But LightWave has a theoretically infinite amount of space. So, if I'm figuring that I've got four or five booths lined up along a wall, I can at worst thump them in there and then build the walls around them. The trick is that I have no idea how large a stage is—whether it's bigger or smaller than a restaurant. Probably it's smaller.

But, without knowing how many booths—probably about six feet wide each—can fit along the rear wall, I can't really work out who can be sitting where, and when. I could write a filmscript instead, supposing that we'd either find a restaurant with the right layout or just build the set to spec, but that presupposes that the budget—which I haven't seen and don't really want to—would cover all that.

So, I just pulled back to what I'm good at in general, and opened Word. In there, if I were in a weird mood, I could make a restaurant the size of Australia. But I won't. Also, in there, I don't have to think about the formatting much, setting dialogue under each character, setting actions around the dialogue, and other boring things. At least, not yet. I'll write the novel and then, if it proves practical to translate it after the fact, I can molest it into a play or film once I have a few numbers.

Anyway. Here's what I've written so far, which I'll probably hang onto by the final cut: Lurkers.

Right now, the prologue notwithstanding [you'll understand], I've got half of the first page written. Though, as I write more, I'll probably upload it and replace the copy on the server [unless a gotard breaks out of prison and eats the server first] with incrementally longer bits until...I don't want to anymore. I dunno. We'll get to that when there's something to get to.

More later....

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Which, to pull a Knowles, was bothersome. Because I limped off to see it at the Tavern which ordinarily isn't all that busy, especially at ten at night; this time, it was full of all manner of morons, from the selfimportant twat guarding a couple open chairs in the crippled section [I rattled my cane at her; she'll have nightmares] to the family of 'tards who wound up sitting in front of us with their obstreperous, malodourous larva which kept escaping its backward backpack to bomb the floor with loose change every few minutes. All of which probably made the film better, given the general moral.

About that: it was creepy. Because I've seen it before. For nineteen years now I've maintained that 1989's Batman was desperately miscast, from getting Mister Mom as Bruce Wayne to infecting Joker with Jake Gittes. Now, finally, people are beginning to see that I was right. And my evidence, apart from popular concession, is Heath Ledger as Swyndle. Albeit Swyndle reading my stuff aloud.

Hunter of course didn't quite see it that way; she concluded that Joker was based completely on me. What she doesn't get, being a little new here, is that I in all modesty [it's the wrong word, but the figure of speech demands it] taught Swyndle a percentage of everything he knows, allowing him to say my things and perform my actions with his own personality, which Ledger pretty well nailed overall. So that was creepy.

Which of course is perfect since, for those who don't know, Swyndle has always been Joker, at least so long as I've known him, which is thirteen years now. Of course, for those who don't know: stay that way; in all irony [this time, it's the right word], for all Swyndle likes to complain that I'm utterly tactless, his next move is always to go about twenty-seven steps further than I ever would. Meaning I think that he's an American. I dunno.

Something else I realised about Ledger: he made Joker intelligent. Romero made him goofy; Jack Nicholson, oscars notwithstanding, made Jack Napier into Jack Torrance; Ledger made him sociopathic, but clever.

As for the supporting cast: I hadn't gone into this expecting much from Eckhart, since the only thing I remember having seen him do before this was Thank You for Smoking [itself a decent film, but nothing requiring Olivier]; but, as much as he was just being himself again for the first half of the film, he did pretty well as TwoFace in the end. Although half the credit goes to the people doing the CG in post; apart from knowing that practical effects and prosthetics couldn't have done that, I wouldn't have guessed that it was digital. Also, astonishingly, it was what got that coindropping pupa in front of us to shut the hell up for a few minutes. Also, as subtly as he played it, Eckhart reminded me that, as much as casting Lando Calrissian as Dent in the first film was a mistake to be corrected later, casting Tommy Lee Jones as something of an openly gay lunatic capable of making even Jim Carrey look sane a couple films later didn't help matters much.

The rest of the cast was a bit incidental. Bale as Batman seems to work; but it also serves to remind me that the only series which can't be saved by plugging him in as the lead proved the exception in American Psycho 2. If you don't know what that means, you'll understand more when Terminator4 comes out next May. If you still don't know what that means, seeing American Psycho 2 will explain it further, but make you wish Terminator4 was a documentary. Otherwise, Morgan Freeman is simply a good actor, and ditto for Gary Oldman; and, while I resist thinking of Michael Caine as anything but the guy who shows up in every film not already featuring Gene Hackman, I'll grant that his Alfred, while a bit gumby, works pretty well.

The rest of the rest of the cast leads us into the gripes. Maggie Gyllenhaal was just boring. That she reminded me a little too much of Kate Bosworth in Superman Returns was probably a factor; but, overall, she didn't really matter much to the film and may officially have been the property of the props department. On which note: why was Scarecrow even in this thing? Just to remind us that this was sort of a sequel to sort of a remake of a remake? Or just to get everyone from the selfimportant twat whose crippled friends never showed up to sit where I didn't sit to the proud owners of the coinbombing hatchling to chortle over his meaningless diagnosis? Guys, please: don't bother knowing your audience if it's not gonna be me, okay? Thanks.

I'm also bothered by the whole thing with the boats. Relatively spoilerfree though I've been to date, we need to talk about something here. Within the storyline, Joker: you don't get clinical results on society's ability to ameliorate [I'm biased] to sociopathy as a group. Yes, at heart, everyone's capable and even interested in killing a group of strangers without ever meeting them; it's the nature of the human animal suppressed by puritards who want to pretend that massproduced cutlery is all it takes to evolve out of the family Hominidae. No, they're not gonna prove it when other hominids might survive to tell the tale. Outside the film, Nolan: you missed your chance to really show whether Joker was based on Swyndle or me; if he'd wired each remote to blow up the boat it was on, that woulda been me. Now, we'll never know.

So. There it is. I won't bother telling you whether to go see this thing; probably, you already have; certainly, I don't care whether you go see it, though the good outweighs the bad to the extent that you'd be better off for going. Or, supposing your television is anything like mine, get the disc and see it without selfimportant cripplehaters and coinspewing ungulates evidently performing their own social experiments.

Let's move on....

Once I got home, I reloaded DrHorrible.com to see the final installment. It didn't end the way I'd figured it would, but it ended well. I won't bother with any spoilers here, since if you click on the link before the show goes off the web [I have no idea how you say 'off the air' in interspeak, and I've been here for twenty-five years now] you'll have the whole thing within an hour; if not, it should be out on disc by the end of the year, just for you tardy little archivereaders. I do have one question not answered and very barely asked in the film: whether Doctor Billy Horrible is in fact Doctor Billy Pratt. Knowing Whedon, it probably is. Though, knowing Whedon, whichever vampires survived the final episode of Angel should probably have appeared however nominally in one of the cancelled future episodes of Firefly. Man, Fox bug me sometimes.

Loosely on the subject of webcast stuff: insofar as it matters, as long as it's taking to get all the models made for it, I've got Deadache done now. Meaning that I've got the series written. Meaning that I've got 120 episodes plotted out to the degree that I could write them down and, if I had everything else ready, start rendering. I'm pretty happy with the ending, even though it seems a bit cheap and maybe even forced. On the other hand, if it started this year, which it probably won't, I'd still have until the twenty-fourth episode of the 2012 season to come up with something better. Amusingly, plotting the whole thing out has taught me, well, two things. One is how to play piano a little better, since, action and dialogue aside, a massive element of the whole hypothetical series is that the whole score is piano [those familiar with ResidentEvil, being the initial victim of this spoof, will understand both the piano and the habit DeLoreans have of appearing every few minutes...if they ever see this thing]; the other is that, while I write better in a restaurant with ashtrays, whatever planet those might exist on these days, I plot better listening to music, and banging music out on the synth seems to qualify, which is something to keep in mind from now on.

There's other stuff I could talk about, but this is getting a bit long now. So, more, possibly including Deadache someday, later....

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To be fair, that specific moron was hoping only to divide Oprah's potential $2.5billion by twenty-five percent of twelve percent of three hundred million, based on the largest amount Oprah might have [other sources say that she's got just over a billion, not quite two and a half], granting that, of three hundred million people in the US, twelve percent are black, of which about twenty-five percent are poor enough to be homeless or on the verge. For the tl;dr crowd, by the way: get out; brevity isn't something I'm into; also, $2.5billion / [300million(12%*25%)] = ~$278. Compare that to the Earned Income Credit the IRS issue to, at this point, approximately everyone, or, worse, to the sort of money it would take, all other factors of reality being perfect, to feed and house and clothe nine million people, and someone, mathematically speaking, is an idiot.

But that's all pretty specific. And you can't be specific when telling everyone who wants to hear it or not that we need a redistribution of wealth in the US. Like, just in general. Skincolour aside. This isn't necessarily about reparations and other getrichquick schemes; this is just the emotarded interest in RobinHooding the vast wealth of the rich and dumping it all on the poor. Without any explanation of actual figures, processes, or, really, logically defensible reasons.

So, let's talk about that for a moment. Including details. Meaning numbers.

That the US are comprised, at this point, of about 300million people is a good number to start with. It's our divisor. If that doesn't make sense yet, you're probably an idiot who wants to see a redistribution of wealth. But, if you're still pretending to read all this, I'll show you something lacking big words which at the least a grownup can help you with: X/300,000,000.

Got it? To be fair, and to keep the numbers as simple as possible, we're gonna take all the money in the country [I assume; if the plan is actually to take all the money in the world, and give it equally to each of nearly seven billion people, we're each gonna be even more disappointed; whatever else the US is, it's one of the richest countries on the planet], then all the money in the country is going to be divided by three hundred million people. Right? Even democrats aren't evil and brainless enough to be thinking that we should rob the rich and leave them with exactly nothing. Are they? To keep the numbers simple, we'll suppose not.

With X/300,000,000, our task now is to find for X. And that gets a little tricky, since X isn't a real number. Well, obviously it's not: it's a letter. But, in algebraic terms, it's supposed to represent a number; what no one's certain of now is precisely what that number would be.

The first problem we run into in looking for the dividend [for the morons, that's the number we're hoping to divide by the divisor, which itself is the X] is that the sum total of all the money in the country is a bit inflated. In fact, if you add up all the money possessed by all the people...I'll put this a better way: if you went to the bank and cleared out your account, getting physical cash to hide in a shoebox in your closet, while each of 299,999,999 other people [let's pretend for the moment that every infant in the country has its own account too] do the same thing, we'll all quickly learn that, in fact, there's not enough money printed within the country to give each of us what we're told we have, all at once. So that's not gonna work. Even if it could, the sad fact is that we don't have those numbers to play with; if anyone's worked out a total number of all assets controlled by all people lumped into a total value for the US, I can't find it. So it's a dead end.

So, what's that leave? I dunno. Probably the closest we can get to a real number is the GDP. That's the Gross Domestic Product. And, as of 2007, it's $13,843,825,000,000. Which is not only a large sack of cash, but as close as I can personally think reflects the amount of money in the country not theoretically spoken for by the deficit, since at the least the twits wanting this redistribution are also heavily into whimpering about the deficit caused nearly exclusively by the army's invasion of Iraq. So those dollars are out of our equation.

So. We have numbers now. We have $13,843,825,000,000/300,000,000. Right? Anyone unclear about this? Anyone both unclear and thinking he's got a better idea? You know what: I'll allow that you might have a better idea; feel free to hit me with it on the messageboard.

So. $13,843,825,000,000/300,000,000=$46,000. Right? Get out your calculators; Start, Programmes, Accessories, Calculators. Thump in 13843825000000, hit /, thump in 300000000, and hit Enter. It's forty-six thousand bucks.

Now, before most of us laugh about this, let's allow that, to a lot of people, that sounds like a huge amount of cash. One in four people make little enough per year that making fifty thousand all at once would be a big deal. In fact, since, out of 300million people, just over 100million are kids [who probably haven't got bankaccounts], what we're really talking about is roughly $150,000 per family, to the extent that a family is on average two grownups and a parasite. But, since that's hard to guess about, and since it doesn't change anything in the actual numbers: to hell with it. We're each getting close to fifty thousand bucks, in total assets, once we've grabbed up all the wealth and handed it out all fairly.

Right? That is fair, isn't it? I mean, we're talking about fifty thousand bucks. If I get that, it's fair. I'm even kinda used to it: in adjusted dollars, it's about what I got in allowance annually as a kid. So, to get fifty grand just all at once, it's perfectly fair; people currently making more than that per year were stupid for making the effort to get paid. Fuck'em.

So. Here's your cash. Whatever money you had before we took it away from you, here's your fifty grand. It's yours. We'll even pretend that the congress didn't send the IRS after a third of it.

So. Now what. Whatcha gonna do tomorrow. Tell ya what I'm gonna do...well, actually, not a lot. I'll keep doing what I do. Write books, think up bumperstickers, and whatever; that should work out nicely, since each of you has fifty thousand bucks now: no more excuses that five bucks for a bumpersticker is something you can't afford. I'm all for this plan, suddenly.

So, you buy a bumpersticker, losing five bucks. I gain...rather less than five bucks, since a large percentage goes to all the little people who stock and market and print and mail and...are they still doing that? They each have fifty grand now. Did they quit their jobs? Surely not for fifty grand. That would be stupid. Uh...wouldn't it?

How about the people who make my coffee at Starbucks. Can I give them my four bucks for coffee, or have they retired to a beachfront property on fifty grand? How about the servers across the street at the pub? Can I give them twenty for a burger and coffee, or are they buying an island in the South Pacific somewhere? Damnit. I'm suddenly not sure I like this idea anymore.

Okay look. To be real about it, fifty grand wouldn't change anyone's life individually if he nearly won the lottery, getting five out of six numbers, and ended up with a prize this small. A few idiots would quit their jobs and go broke in a month or two; but let's assume that the country as a whole isn't that dumb. It's a stretch; but we can dream. Thusly, I can still get coffee and you can still get bumperstickers, and it's all kinda zerosum overall. So, you give me five bucks, retaining $49,995 [I'm cheating up from $46,146 now, for easier math], and I get, like, an extra dollar as my cut, pushing me to $50,001. Now I buy coffee, and I have $49,997. Works for me.

That's tomorrow.

The next day, more people buy sitckers; I buy more coffee. And so on. I make a dollar and spend four until I'm broke. Or, really, I make a dollar every time each of you buys a sticker, and buy coffee when I'm thirsty. If I keep track of that impossible equation, I'll stay at or above fifty grand in my pocket; if not, I'll be in favour of redistributing the wealth again next time, because I'm a fucking idiot who can't manage money.

Of course, next time, we won't be pretending that I don't deserve to have the sixty thousand or so that I've got by now since, while I did inherit fifty thousand effortlessly: so did you.

So. You wanna take all the money in the country, being close to fourteen trillion, and hand it to three hundred million people, giving each close to fifty thousand? Go ahead. If you can talk everyone else into it and make it happen: go ahead. But understand that, if you're currently poor because you're an idiot who thinks that All the Money in the Country somehow gets you enough to live all comfy for ever and ever, if you're currently poor because the mathemagics are beyond your little brain's ability to understand, then you're gonna be right back here again next year. And, next year, we who have more than we started with this year in our pockets are gonna play the Fool Me Once Card and tell you to go to hell.

For those who think the better system would be simply to issue fifty thousand to everyone annually, to spend without working at Starbucks on whatever you can buy at places other than Starbucks: you're stupider than the rest; please move to the United Shithead Socialist Republic and leave the rest of us alone. Or, you know, to Boulder. Whatever's closer.

Of course, that's just my opinion; now it's yours, for free.

Time for the Spam of the Day.... Resume..Job Offer..No Fee Involved From: Usha Martin Ltd [joboffer@rodigarii.com] To: Dear Applicant, Recently we came across your Career Profile and upon an initial review, we think that you may make an excellent addition to the Usha Martin family! Welcome to Usha Martin Ltd. One of the ten best Indian source for quality Steel and Metallurgic Products. Visit our website www.ushamartin.com for more information about us and placing orders. Meanwhile, We are experiencing enormous challenges in attending promptly to our customers demand due to increased demands from the Australia, United Kingdom, Canada and United State Of America which we have not been able to process competently since we do not have a Financial Officer in this countries. Hence,We decided to employ Contract home employees (Telecommuters) to help us in this regard in processing payments, You are not involved in any sales, you will also serve as an Usha Martin representative in your Country and as such u would be in a conduit for the payments coming from customers in your region. BENEFITS: *You will earn an enviable monthly salary of $4,000. *You have salary option of Monthly or Bimonthly payment. *You will work for a little less than 7hrs a week. Should you be interested in taking up this job position send a reply containing the following information to our Head of human resources department Mr Abasalom at (abasalombrghtn@gmail.com) Full Names: Contact Address(P.O. Box not allowed): City/State/Zip Code: Home/Cell Phone Numbers: Email Address: Age: Sex: Marital Status: Present Occupation: We shall get back to you after receiving these information to confirm your placement in our company. Yours faithfully, Mr S Somani Director of Finance Usha Martin Ltd, Kolkata India I can't quite tell whether this is a 403 scam or not. Maybe those are evolving. I dunno. What's funny, on the subject, is that the job I didn't apply for and don't want is offering four grand a month. Times twelve? Why, that's about $48,000, innit. Apparently, I won't be needing this gig.

More later....

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The site's updated a bit. Not a lot. Things still look about the same, since I'm okay with the version we switched to a couple years ago. But, some of the sidebar stuff wasn't working, and I hadn't updated the backend in a while; so, everything's all caught up in the dashboard thing you can't see, and the linksystem you can see, to the left, has improved a bit.

There's a bit more to do. Maybe a lot more. But, at the least, I need to update a few things still lurking on the server as .html files from the nineties by cloning them into the blogueware here. I'll get to it. Sometime.

For now, I'm kinda tired of sitting here. Just at the moment. So I'm probably gonna wander over to the pub—possibly with the laptop—and see whether that helps me think somehow. Probably it won't. Historically, I've managed to get hit by gregarions there for nothing more than having the PSP with me. Also, they got me all drunk. And then I rode home on the mountainbike. Remember, Kids: don't get drunk and ride your bike around. No reason. I didn't crash. I just somehow got from the top of a hill to the bottom without actually noticing that I'd done it. When I get drunk, I mostly just drop a lot of frames. It's weird.

Anyway. I probably won't take the bike this time. I think my knee still hurts. I mean: I know it still hurts; but it always hurts a bit. I assume it still hurts to walk a kilometre without the cane. Though in fact that hurts too. It just helps a bit. There's the bike, which I can pedal with one leg, which also helps, and which I can lean on like a cane if I can't pedal it with one leg; but...I guess I could just take the bike. I'll think about it.

The shoes Hunter got a shot of, which she didn't upload. Meaning she didn't upload the shot. She didn't upload the shoes either; but I'm okay with that.

Ooh. Also, I got new shoes. Which was odd. Partly because they're old shoes: more ChuckTaylors, to kinda replace the ones I got in Atlanta in 1989 which, being about twenty years old, look about twenty years old. The weird part was that I'd been up for twelve hours when I ordered them, and I was still up when FedEx got them here. So, either I was up for a really long time, or zappos.com rock. Or both. Then of course I was still up six hours after FedEx got here; but that's not very interesting.

Also not interesting is the part where Hunter got shots of my old shoes next to my new ones, but didn't upload them to the server. Yet. So...that's her fault; and I'll leave the dead image in place over there until she gets round to it. Maybe next time she'll do things faster. But probably not.

Spam of the Day time, since I haven't done one of those lately. Also, because this is really stupid. Were Hiring Locally this Monday-12 Jul 2008 03:18:35 -0400 From: Help Wanted [helpcenter@truthisaselffulfillingprophecy.com] To: gremlin@gremlin.net CC: vCakmvAZyv@truthisaselffulfillingprophecy.com 295.00 and up, Local Hires Needed: http://truthisaselffulfillingprophecy.com/track?e=33ET1X4In3ET1X4IYITs&m=1486176&l=0 Check for positions in your area http://truthisaselffulfillingprophecy.com/track?e=1VzFuYD6JVzFuYD646Fb&m=1486176&l=0 Immediate Placement July 7th, 2008 To stop receiving these http://truthisaselffulfillingprophecy.com/ufroc?m=1486176&l=1 Or write to: 8721/Santa-Monica/Blvd. Los-Angeles-CA/90069 Change your preferences by going to: http://truthisaselffulfillingprophecy.com/unsub.php?e=gremlin@gremlin.net&m=1486176 or send request to: CS/4101/Tates_Creek_Centre_D/Box 182/Lexington/KY/40517 <4;4nPSzMeBDnPSzMeBKBSq;1486176> I see a couple of problems here. First, and most obvious, truth is not a selffulfilling prophesy. Truth is an abstract concept, meant to identify that which is known to be true, insofar as its truthiness has yet been established; so long as that which is true, itself being truth, is established, there's nothing for itself to fulfill; it's already handled. Second: I'm not sure what 295.00 is. Dollars? Whose? If it's mine, and you want it, forget it; I don't care. If it's yours, and you're trying to hire me, you can't: my consulting rate is $300 per hour, and I don't do things for fifty-nine minutes. It's just impractical. Try again; and, as a hint, try offering at least four figures next time. Third: I'm not in Los Angeles. Although my server, and therefore my EMail address, is based in California. More on that in a minute. Meanwhile, while offering at least four figures, you'll also want to send a Gulfstream I can smoke on to get me out there to consult. Fourth: I have no need to tell you to stop spamming me in order to stop receiving this shit. I have doubts, in fact, that it would work. Which is one of the reasons I'm based in California. Which is next. Fifth: By Californian Law, your criminal act of spamming me unsolicited offers entitles me to $500 per infringement. This is one. Please use http://spamfine.gremlin.net to send the five hundred bucks before you spam me again.

Okay. I'm gonna go off and get some coffee and stuff now. More later....

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Wanna few examples? Okiedokie....

To begin with, I’ve been up for a few minutes when I get to the computer and restart the chatroom which unfailingly fails after exactly three hours. And the first line I see is...to be precise, I’ll go grab it....

m.t_blackwell: [105] robert l deakin 907 376 2905 = b_rad

Supposing that might not make any immediate sense to the people who hit this site but avoid the messageboard, other sites, the chatroom, and anyplace else they’d get to hear about dra_b: dra_b is a troll, a fraud, a criminal, a ’tard beyond precedent, and various clinical terms I’d hate to confuse searchengines with.

To put this all into perspective, this is also dra_b:

3:09:34 AM b_radmetropolis: gremlin i am going to decapitate you

So, you see where I have this deal where the guy is both stupid beyond precedent and also fodder for any opinion I might have. Incidentally, that threat and more can be found in the eternally biggernising casefile at http://gotards.com/drab, for those masochists who might wanna suffer through—to date—442 kilobytes of dra_bian idiocy. If his kilobytes were cubic inches, dra_b would be a musclecar: manufactured in 1969, rusting and faded, and sadly outrun by modern competitors half his weight.

The funny part comes later where, given that smattering of data with which to play intarweb detectivist, we tracked down the imbecile’s address and found it on a satmap [glorified outhouse with corrugated roof on the outskirts of an inkspot nearly within hitchhiking distance of Anchorage], place of kindasorta employment, criminal record [larger than satmapped outhouse], et cetera. Meaning that, in point of fact, the idiot threatening to, among other equally laughable crimes, decapitate me has to his credit been charged at least twice with beating up a chick or two.

So, that made my day, before it had barely begun.

To celebrate—or, really, to get the hell outta here and process a few things I was trying to think about, with or without Zombi the Siren screaming at me about something in Felinese—I went out for another limp. Hunter was right there with me, after twenty minutes of debating the best choice of shoes, my own input being unimportant since it was limited primarily to don’t care; grab two; possibly of the same brand; leaving now; I hate you so much; door get out door into world go damnit to hell. Or something to that effect.

Then a quick kilometre to Starbucks, which hurt my knee only lots, to grab some coffee; and next to the barber to do that stupid thing where I get my hair cut so I can wonder what I was thinking for the next six weeks until it grows out enough to make me think that cutting it might be, you know, a good idea. Usually, I’m really wrong about that. But, it was short enough even yesterday that the clever idea of ignoring it until it’s a couple feet long again is a journey of several years; and getting there is half the suck. Or, really, around seventy-eight percent. Ish.

And off to the authentic English pub with the food everyone but me hates, since I’ve got an acquired lack of taste for boiled meat and potatoes. And now, though Hunter is less than zero help, but loud about it, I ponder what I’d wanted to think about the whole time the cat wouldn’t shut up, which was whether I really wanted to get into the murky gig of playwriting [see yesterdayish’s What’s New] granting that it’s something of a slippery slope toward going Hollywood and becoming pretty much everything I hate about the obese midgets already doing that sort of job. Hunter’s meaningless input was that I should do it simply because I’d get paid a lot for it, all ethics aside; which is why I’m pleased to announce my forthcoming service of sleeping with any chick but Hunter, just for the cash it would generate. Incidentally, this service will be performed exclusively within rural Nevada, for those who think they’ve just caught me in a conspiracy to commit some meaningless, victimless crime. Neener. Offer expires when I post this What’s New, so Call Now.

As for the playwright gig: once I was actually allowed to think about it, I pretty well decided to be okay with it. It’s just funny, to me, since the whole business is weird. If I write a book, and it’s forty bucks, I get a dollar or two; if I write a play—which is shorter, simpler, and possibly easier, and it’s seventy-five to get in to see it, I get a decent percentage. So it’s a little like the music industry, except that the people actually thinking things up are the ones actually getting paid, not the egregious morons signing deals behind their backs to sneak their stuff into films and adverts.

I know people in bands; I don’t really envy them.

Then I drank a gallon of coffee for a while, and we limped on.

EDIT: Fun Fact. I write these things in Microsuck Word. Since it's got a spellcheck. Which guarantees that I won't misspell any words. Of those I don't invent as needed. Accounting for up to seventy-one percent of the words I use. One word I tried to use was Walgreens. Word assured me I'd misspelled Walgreen's. So I let Word change it to Walgreen's. Having just gone to walgreens.com to look it up, since it's seemed really weird all this time, it actually is Walgreens, Word's lies notwithstanding. So I fixed it. Also, I kinda hate Word. I kinda hate it a lot.

One stop, since I’d wanted to get a shot of something no one believes I’d seen there, was Walgreens. Which sucked, since they no longer had the thing I’d seen there. So, I can’t prove it now; but, if you’ll take my word for it: I saw a cool little BlisterPackOpener. Which, just to disprove any and all intelligent designers, came packaged trapped within—what else—a fucking blisterpack. That it’s no longer available somehow fails to shock me; it’s almost like other smart people saw it and doubleyouteeeffed a bit about it. Just, you know, maybe.

But that’s okay. I gotcha something else instead. Because, right about now, that gallon of coffee is getting bored and wants to go on without me. So, being crippled and only six and a half feet tall, I con this envested chick into opening the biosafety three mensroom electronic lock and letting me in to wish the coffee on its merry, mutated way. And then, wondering how stupid my hair might look, being now dry, I try to look in the mirror.

Now. Before I really get into the adjectives about this idiotic device, let’s talk about one specifically: tall. Because, really, I’m not. I know—just at the moment—dozens of guys [and, given heels, one or two chicks] who are my height, being six four to six six. I know a handful over six seven, and a couple nearing seven feet. People my height you’ve heard of? Steve King. George Romero. Jeff Goldblum [don’t say it]. Conan O’Brien. Half the guys in SlipKnot. Penn Jillette. Christopher Lee. Vincent Price. Douglas Adams. The other guy in Deophagy. All of these people are within an inch either way of my increasingly common 194 centimetres. Okay? I am not in any sense freakishly tall. I’d hazard to claim that I’m perfectly average, and an inordinate number of you little nuts are uncommonly short. This ain’t my fault.

Now, we have this mirror. And it’s actually set into the wall on an inclined plane, pointing itself floorward at a twenty degree angle. Meaning that, while I’m only 194cm, the following shot was snapped while I was in fact holding the phonecam beneath my eyelevel, putting it at, say, maybe six feet off the floor exactly.

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall: Who's the floorest of them all....

So. You see now how I know indisputably that I am perfectly average or shorter in height. Or, as you might guess, the mirror wouldn’t be criptacularly pointed down to a level at which the meekly infinitesimal midgets standing only five foot eleven could fare some remote chance in hell of seeing themselves in this thing. Meaning that, in a burst of multifaceted irony, I could see my cane in this stupid sideshow mirror, but not my hair. Because, evidently, my hair is not crippled, and therefore must look okay after all. To be honest, in fact, I still haven’t actually seen it now that it’s dry. Just for You, I limped precisely the hell in here to entertain you with my endless plight. I hope you’re happy; and that’s as sarcastical as I can be while relying on text, you thankless bastards.

Of course, I don’t fully have to rely on text. Obviously, there’s the snap above illustrating the one point. Better still, once Hunter snakes it off her DigiCam, gets it to me to upload to the server, which can then brainlessly process the .mpeg into a .flv [or whatever it does to it; I haven’t bothered with fullmotion here in a while], you should ultimately get to see what I’ll ultimately have crammed in here next, even if it means posting this nowish and editing it later to include it. Supposing that might take more than a minute or two, it’s possibly better [stupider] than the BlisterPackedBlisterPackOpener I didn’t get a shot of. So, now’s the time to hit F5 a lot, which at the least increases your chances of seeing an advert up in the upper right you’re curious enough about to click on and get me anywhere from a nickel to ten bucks, since I can’t according to the contract outright ask you to do that if you weren’t planning to do it anyway, as if I’d know what you were planning—you’re probably short, and therefore not entirely to be trusted, you mirrormolesting twerps.

Assuming that the fullmotion footage came out as good as I’m hoping, and cuts off where I hope it did, that itself should be a good note to end this thing on. So, until I see something else worth exploiting: more later....

Professionally speaking—because, like, that’s an adverb which applies to me and all—there might be a bit of news, at least on the horizon. For one thing, something I’ve been largely ignoring for about a year now was this idea of molesting the primary plotline of Night of the Living Dead into a play. Which I wasn’t thrilled with. Partly because it’s definitively hacking something already out there; partly because it’s already been done, reportedly as a musical [I dunno]; partly because I’m getting kinda sick of zombies; partly because, while I’d changed a lot of things present in the original and in Savini’s remake, I still wasn’t thrilled with the outcome. So I think I’m giving up on that. Also, my computer kinda puked hard and, if I managed to save the .fdr, I have no idea where it is now.

But that’s okay. NotLD having been pretty well greenlit simply because I’d agreed to write it, and people willing to have been in it simply because I was the one doing all the dialogue and whatever else I’m supposed to be so good at, the title and plotline in general were apparently kinda irrelevant. So this should be amusing to those who have been coming here for the last ten years or so: NotLD being abandoned, I instead pitched the basic idea from Lurkers, and they loved it. For those who haven’t been here since 1998 or earlier, that was this thing I’d thrown together over the course of six hours sitting at Perkins, with an ashtray, so someone looking to shoot a studentfilm could go out and make it. That being Hutch, which was a flake, it never went anywhere and I nearly completely forgot about it. Until tonight. When it came up again.

So, the thing now is to rewrite that, since it was originally supposed to have been a film set in the present day of 1998. Now it’s supposed to be a play set in the present day of 2008. That it’s a play is immaterial, since the only need to have moved the camera in the original version would have been to keep people awake. That it’s set ten years later changes a lot of things, like predictive conversations about whether they’ll ever manage to ban smoking in restaurants and whether there’ll ever be more disappointing a president than a hillbilly known primarily for fucking a fatchick; those questions have been answered.

The idea now is to notice that the world, and more importantly the local scene—wherever you are—sucks beyond our ability to have predicted it ten years ago, and a few bleak predictions for 2018 which’ll probably turn out to have been shortsighted by then. The only real trick is that, here in 2008 as it actually is, no one really hangs out lurking in restaurants all night anymore, because the sort who do are insulted by smokingbans. And I’m not sure you can have a play based on a chatroom in any conceivable way.

So, there’s that. And, now that I’ve admitted it, it’ll probably find some way of unhappening. But, we’ll see.

In loosely related news, I went out for a limp to see what I could come up with for the play while I wasn’t sitting here banging it all out. And I got Hunter to grab a backcover shot, since people keep complaining that the back cover of a given book never has a shot of me on it. Even when I used Swyndle’s sketch for News of the Stupid last fall. So, now, I’ve got this shot instead. Probably, I’ll use it on the back of the next book which probably will be Imbecilese. In fact, I’m pretty sure it will be; what I’m not sure of yet is which of about five ways I could write it will prove to have been the one I ran with. I suppose I’ve got a few months to think about that, since I tend to write monologuistic/raconteuristic books like this in November as a matter of law.

More unprofessionally—which never happens, which lets me write everything off—I got approximately to the end of DeadRising a couple days ago. Technically, I finished the game. Realistically, I went into overtime, waded through several thousand zombies in a tunnel, destroyed a tank shooting missiles at me, and then died instantly when the guy driving the tank never let me hit him at all. I think I know how to kill him; but my last savepoint was before the damned tunnel, and I’m simply not in a hurry to go kill that damned tank again. Also, DeadRising is one reason I’ve decided to hate zombies. Which is funny. Half the reason I wrote Paroxysm was because I’d never seen a zombiefilm exhibit more than two or three dozen stuntmen with necrotic skin moaning at the survivors, and I wanted something extant to at least describe a situation in which thousands upon thousands of zombies could coexist at people. The XBox360’s ability to coat lowpoly figures with decent textures in realtime has made that possible after all, and got me to really, really hate the undead. Gropey little bastards.

On the other hand, now that I can play most XBox games, including the ones designed for SDTVs, I tracked down Stubbs the Zombie and played the hell outta that. Sure, it’s a stupid retropolitan satire designed for people young enough to find it hilarious and old enough to keep Jack Thompson from whimpering about it, cannibalism aside; but it’s kinda fun, and worth it if only for the cutscene with Eddie Stubbs spoofing Patton in front of the flag with a speech containing only the word ‘brains’. And of course the little eastereggs which neither apologise nor demand a lot of attention, like the sign in the copshop reading something like FRIENDLY FIRE. Remember: Shoot Civilians, Not Cops. Stuff that, you know, I’d do. If it were up to me. Though I’d probably make boring, realistic games in which a zombie biting you once was lethal, and in which shooting even the largest, most annoying levelboss in a mall full of zombies once was also lethal. I hate levelbosses; they’re stupid beyond words. Almost as stupid as getting bit by crowds of zombies and only running into trouble when you have no more gallons of orange juice in your pocket.

I could go on, but I won’t. Mostly because I could probably save it for Lurkers or Imbecilese, where people’ll figure it’s reasoned and intentional. The fools.

More later....

For those who, for whatever reason, hit gremlin.net to see what’s going on, and then stop: there’s stuff going on. But, to date, it’s been on the board and at newsofthestoopid.com. Eventually, it’ll be at KingStoopids.com, I suppose—probably including this. But, since gremlin.net is a safer, less structured mess than NotS is, it makes more sense to go into all the revised detail here, instead of there.

So, here’s what’s happened. So far.

Our story begins in 1997. Because that’s when gremlin.net started. Also, it’s when gremlin.net had a chatroom. Which is pretty much how I first encountered Hunter: she was a regular in there, spending hours per day talking to everyone else. She was sixteen and had a strong interest in genetics and virology; so we had a bit to talk about.

Then, in 1998, she joined the army. Mostly to become a virologist and to play with viral warfare. There are those who’d consider that kinda crazy; but, at the time, she was more or less sane.

Unfortunately, it was Clinton’s army, in that transitional phase from Death before Dishonour to Veggies before Dessert. Meaning that everyone above about E2 was resisting the change and generally taking it out on the new recruits. So, by the time she got out, which partially involved me talking to an O3 [I could go into some detail on that; but I might have to do it again sometime; I might, in fact, have to do something like it regarding what’s going on right now], one of her disabilities was PostTraumatic Stress Disorder. Which, as Carlin has explained, is shellshock with a happy, convoluted euphemism over it.

Which means that, while Hunter’s okay in chatrooms where she’s not technically confronting anyone, she’s a little different offline where she can’t answer the front door. She okay with me [partly because of that thing with the O3], but, with strangers...it took her a couple years of hiding behind me and watching the same guy at Starbucks before she could develop the ability to ask if she could maybe have some tea. It’s a shellshock thing: she can’t operate as usual in society, because everyone out there is the enemy; and she’s a bit outnumbered. She can’t even sit at a restaurant for long, because it’s full of enemies and she gets claustrophobic. That sort of thing.

One factor of all this is that she’s not too happy about hitting a grocery store when it’s full of people. So, when she needs more soda and stuff, she’s better at waiting until everyone’s asleep, including most of the people working at grocery stores. Which brings us up to last night. Or, really, two in the morning on 3rd June, since which I’ve slept once, making it last night. Ish. She’s out of soda, it’s two in the morning, and the only place open nearby is KingStoopids.

In fact, it’s KingSoopers, which everyone I’ve ever met calls KingStoopids. That I was able to get KingStoopids.com yesterday [whatever day that was, before I got some sleep] was a bit surprising; but that’s its own thing.

So, we walked over to KingStoopids. Which is an important factor. It’s maybe a mile from here, so it’s an easy walk. The method is to wander over with an empty backpack or two, get soda, get outside with it, get the soda into the backpacks, and walk back home. We’ve been doing this once or twice a week since buying the house in 2004. It’s not a big deal unless there’s a blizzard; then it’s a little upsetting.

As for KingStoopids: it’s a mess. This is a rich neighbourhood, so the place has hardwood floors and speciality foods and brandnamed microwaves and blenders and things. But it’s also got outdated buildingcodes. At night, when it’s only transients and shoplifters out on the streets, they close up the big friendly main doors, leaving only the customer service exit open. Which has always bugged me a bit. Partly because, if I’m awake at two in the morning, I’m not good enough to use the real doors; partly because, as a nominal cripple, there are still nights on which my knee isn’t too happy about having to wrench open a hinged door which swings outward before I can pivot around the thing, get inside, trigger the automated exit, limp like the wind back outside to grab a cart, and counterlimp back in with it before the automated doors close. I’ve been meaning to say something, probably including the letters ADA, about that for a while now.

Last night [or whatever] my knee was okay, but only because all the painkillers I’d been taking for the headache I’d had since May, which hadn’t killed the headache, had at least got me to forget about my knee. Not that having a headache and being reminded that I’m some sort of criminalistic mendicant who can’t be trusted with the real entrance does good things for a headache. But that, at this point, is just kinda life as usual.

So we get inside and get the soda. Then we wander around a bit looking for munchies, largely because I’m not sure I can get back home without passing out. It’s a headache thing. I need kilocalories. Maybe it’s also a metabolism thing. Don’t judge me: at least I’m thin. It should probably be mentioned, in all lament, that this will probably prove to have been the last time in years to come that Hunter was okay with having me stray an aisle or two away from her at a grocery store in the middle of the night without having a panicattack and shutting down for several hours. Though I’ve since learned that she’d noticed at the time that some creepy guy in a cheap outfit was stalking her the whole time we were in there; I’ll take her word for it: as much as my head hurt, I was having trouble noticing whether a Cuisinart qualified as munchies; I’ve since concluded that it doesn’t. I got some JackLink’s A1 beefjerky into the cart and we were done.

That brings us to getting the hell outta this snobby little store, stalkers notwithstanding. Because no one evidently works at KingStoopids after dark, all the checkout lanes are characteristically closed, leaving only this horrid little bot to deal with. I’ve heard that these machines are spawning and festering throughout the country now, so you might know what I’m talking about here: a large computer with a small CPU allowing [forcing] You the Consumer to scan the barcodes of everything you’re buying from this happy fluorescent automat, one thing at a time, before hoping to hell that the weightplate beneath the suspended sack will believe that you’ve got one case of soda into the bag before scanning the next, identical case of soda you’d had in the cart. The system is doomed; apparently, I’m the only one who’s noticed.

But, after a few minutes of fighting with Edgar the Computer from Electric Dreams [I hate it when cultural references are so arcane that you have to identify the source], we got done, got the receipt, and got going.

At which point Hunter’s phantom stalker appeared. Possibly an employee [though we had our doubts, since an employee might be employed to run a damned checkout lane]; probably an idiot [it had the outfit for one]. I’ve already covered all the dialogue as well as I can remember it over at http://ks.newsofthestoopid.com so I won’t clone the kilobytes here; what counts is that he selfimportantly if uncertainly informed us that he had to search our backpacks now.

I declined his offer and kept walking until I was out the door where I could light a cigarette. Which in retrospect was stupid. Because he got in front of Hunter, if not in front of me, and physically prevented her from leaving. Call it what you like: kidnapping, abduction, felonious detainment, unlawful arrest; her hostage situation had begun.

So: two things. First, and my fault, if I’d stayed behind her as we left, watching what this stalker was up to, he’d have kidnapped me too, at which point I’ve got this fun rule: if you kidnap me in a grocery store, I reserve the right to light a cigarette after the amount of time it would have taken me to get outside had I not been kidnapped; call a cop if you like, I wouldn’t mind making a statement myself. Second, and his fault, he’s kidnapped a shellshocked disabled veteran who took two years to trust the Starbucks guy well enough to ask for tea.

Should I expect this idiot to have known that she was a shellshocked disabled vet? No more than I should have been expected to know that KingStoopids was a gametrail of kidnappers. Now, of course, we all know both these things: don’t kidnap Hunter; don’t go to KingStoopids without a gun.

All of which is retrospective. As it played out at the time, I was outside with a cigarette, and she was inside with a kidnapper. Again, the dialogue is at the other site, along with the footage.

Something else I’m not sure about, and I can only blame the headache trying to convince me that blenders were edible, is why I didn’t just go the hell back inside and, optionally, kill the kidnapper to death. Sure, the doors aren’t cripplefriendly; but I probably could have gone back to the hinged door, got it open, got inside, and smoked at the guy. I didn’t. I kinda wish I had.

Ultimately, the guy forced Hunter out of the way, grabbed the backpacks, slapped them to the floor [I think he tried to slam the to the floor, but backpacks full of air don’t tend to slam properly], unzipped them, gawked at them, and meekly told them ‘That’s weird’, which is when I came within a tenth of a second of consoling the moron with ‘Awww; who’s deh stoopid crimmynell’ but decided against it.

Mostly because backpacks are inanimate and replaceable That this idiot had pursesnatched and searched them was a crime, but not major damage. Now, though, Hunter’s angry. And that’s been known to get ahead of the shellshock and allow her to confront an idiot. She heads for the rack of commentcards, asking for this idiot’s name. His reaction was to grab for her, which woulda worked if she hadn’t shifted out of his way. Backpacks aside, we’ve got this problem now; that got me to remember that I’d actually thought to grab my phone before we left the house.

Funny. In leaving the house, I’d grabbed the phone thinking that it wasn’t impossible that I’d eventually need it to call an ambulance; my headache was about that bad. Instead, I now needed it to call the police.

Then I remembered two more things: that the closest school of squadcars was likely five minutes away, and that my mobilephone records video. So I switched to cameramode and aimed it at the guy. Mostly to stun him into realising, I suppose, that, whatever he did next was about to be filmed and EMailed from the phone to my secured server. Though, in retrospect again, I was probably taking a chance in hoping that a guy who didn’t know about PTSD or the laws against kidnapping would know that phones have been able to do that for a couple years now; this is the sort of twerp who, in 2008, still regards my palmtop from 1997 as a gift from the future.

That I was filming him, though, worked out amazingly. Not only did he back away from his probable plan of tearing Hunter apart to see whether any KingStoopids property was to be found in her spleen, but he got narcissistic enough to remind me, on film, that he’d searched my backpack without my permission because, as the store’s manager, it was his right and responsibility.

I debated him a bit about that, rewording his argument into the communist manifesto, which may have flustered and distracted him enough to let Hunter escape. And that was basically that. Outside, we got the stuff out of the cart and got to the sidewalk, down the street, across a couple of crosswalks, down another street to [how funny is this] Safeway, closed, but customerhappy enough to have these little umbrellatables out front; we sat down, got the stuff into the violated backpacks at last, and walked home where I could write a NotS and format a phonecammed video for webcast. If the video is hard to find at newsofthestoopid.com [the software running on the site doesn’t underline or discolour links; it emboldens them, which confuses people] it’s at http://newsofthestoopid.com/eugene.html.

The story since then....

By now...16.02 on 4th June, a few thousand people have seen last night’s article and had various things to say about it, from ‘wow do kingstoopids suck’ to ‘how could you not have known that kingstoopids suck’; to the latter, I can only say that, while I knew they sucked, I hadn’t known they were Gitmo. Now I do; and knowing is half the battle.

The other half is more fun. Of the people I’ve talked to or heard from, none has yet tried in any way to defend KingStoopids’ crimes [meaning that, to date, the EMail Hunter sent to KingStoopids Corporate asking about their policy of holding disabled vets hostage for saving the planet by walking to a store with a backpackshaped purse containing a driver’s licence, creditcards, and housekeys she was in no hurry to hand over to a kidnapper hasn’t yet got a reply]; but, lawyers, a judge, other KingStoopids employees, managers and owners of other retail stores, et cetera, have all assured me that, legally and ethically and intelligently, you do not ever kidnap a suspected shoplifter; the corporate and legal procedure is invariably to confront the suspected shoplifter, ask him to wait while you call the police, see whether the police think you have a case, have the police detain the suspected shoplifter on site while they review the evidence you might have and determine whether it constitutes probable cause [exempli gratia: a security video showing the suspected shoplifter stashing things into a backpack; not the word of a stalking kidnapper who though he maybe witnessed something], and then, if all those requirements are properly met, the police, and only the police, can conjecture exigent circumstances and search and seize whatever the suspected shoplifter might have stolen. Which incidentally leads to two important points.

First. Provided that the police have done everything correctly before searching a backpack, yet still found nothing of stolen property, they and the idiot who called them are still liable for legal and civil damages. So there’s still that risk, whether that lessens the comparative risk of merely kidnapping a disabled vet and performing an illegal search while impersonating an officer with the best case scenario of finding something entirely inadmissible at the end.

Second. It’s not shoplifting until you’ve left the store. In point of legal fact, you, as a shopper, can walk into a store, use a backpack as a shopping cart, fill it up, and get to the edge of the premises before you can be rationally suspected of intending to steal anything; until you’ve left, there remains the probability that you intend to go to the checkout lane and pay for everything. Which I suppose is why you see all that stuff near the entrance, on the public side of the registers, which you can somehow magically attempt to buy without going to prison for touching the stuff in the first place.

All that said, everyone I’ve talked to or heard from hopes that I’ll take this to the police and press charges, or at the least sue KingStoopids to hell for several dozen crimes and damages. With one exception. Hunter. Who’s back to being shellshocked and unable to ask the Starbucks guy for tea. She’s unable to contemplate talking to the police, who are as much uniformed control officers as everyone from E3 to O2 in the army were, about any of this or anything else. Starbucks aside, she’s never been much for answering the door and dealing with the uniformed UPS guy who needs a signature for an XBox.

Which is why I haven’t yet told the police. So far as I know. Unless there are a few cops who happen to read this stuff online. Who, in the apotheosis of irony, would lack the probable cause to subpoena InterNIC for my records so they could get hold of me and discuss my options. Maybe someone at KingStoopids can use their soviet policies to get that information for the constabulatory.

So I’m not sure what to do next. That I’ve waited...around thirty-six hours without having done anything more than got a percentage of the world to laugh at and swear to avoid KingStoopids in the future is acceptable: it took me this long [maybe longer] to get Hunter to calm down about it all. No one’s likely to fault me, without angering a jury, for dealing with a basketcased shellshocked disabled vet before hurrying out to call the police to the scene. Whether the police can process my statement without having to talk to Hunter, and whether there’s any way for me to go give them a statement without leaving Hunter here alone, are questions. Though in fact those are questions that the police might be able to answer. Maybe I’ll go ask them in a minute.

So, for now, the story ends. I’m sure there will be more eventually. Probably, one day, KingStoopids Corporate will have worked out their damagecontrol spin and Emailed Hunter back to...who knows; maybe they’ll report that Eugene N Manager is now running a store in Peru; maybe they’ll report that the security video of the only exit from three in the morning on 3rd June has been misplaced indefinitely so they’re unable to confirm or deny any events which might have occurred. Whatever the news, I don’t acknowledge gagorders or write retractions; the best I can promise are updates. And I suspect there’ll be updates soonish and often.

More later....