Stirring the Drudgery

It’s been a little while since I’ve put up a missive…basically because there’s not that much going on. No new issues have popped up around the world to ignite my need to drop an a-bomb down some blithering idiot government official’s chimney. No new major life occurrences have happened to update about. However, it’s 1:30 in the morning and I am unable to sleep, and need something to fill that time with, so why not blather! In other words, get ready for several paragraphs of somewhat interesting general information! Yeah!

Went and caught MFC 20 at the River Cree last Friday (hence my absence from the viewage of the Galactica of Battlestar…didn’t even think of it until I was already at the place, so it was a tad late to inform anyone. Lemme guess, since I wasn’t there, Guth actually showed up?)…not a bad card overall. Actually, MFC has become a pretty solid MMA promotion with some pretty solid names showing up to fight…I could drop a bunch of names on you that none of you would know (unless you’ve become uber-fight geeks like me, downloading 3 year old Pride FC pay per view cards to see older fights from guys you’re just getting to know and following the cards of regional shows with ghastly names like Warlords : Let the Bodies Hit the Floor). Unfortunately, the one guy I was REALLY hoping would win (a vet British fighter named Paul Daley who loves to knock guys the fuck out) lost…so a bit of a downer. Still, I’d definitely go check out one of their cards live again…pretty solid overall.

As for my home viewing habits, it’s been on to Season Two of the Wire. At first it was kind of jolting, realizing that the cops I came to know in Season One were now sharing time with a whole schwack of new characters…however, it works. The news ones are interesting, and I appreciate the cojones it takes to pull a stunt like that on a big TV show and make it work. Nice to see some fucking testicular fortitude in a medium that’s become about as exciting as warmed over plain oatmeal for the most part. Oh, and McNulty’s still the man…if I could be an alcoholic, womanizing cop who lives to screw over his old boss…

My favorite scene from The Wire so far, though, is still from Season One. McNulty and his partner go over to an apartment that was the scene of a murder. They spend several minutes of TV time looking over the scene, figuring things out…and do not speak a single word that isn’t a four letter expletive. There’s something inherently, weirdly hilarious about two cops going about their business while muttering “Shit…shit shit shit…fuck…motherfuckin’ fuck fuck fuck…motherfucker…goddamn fuckin’ shit…” over and over again under their breath. Shockingly, that sentence WASN’T just an excuse to drop a pile of 4 letter bombs!

I’ve also started watching UFO (by which I mean I watched the first episode). Holy crap is it glorious. 70′s television in all it’s drinking and smoking on the job wonder! The main guy has the blue eyed, blonde haired look of a neo-Nazi…only he dresses like some weird 70′s mod (picture, if you will, said Nazi in a one piece pantsuit over a turtleneck) while prancing about like a mincing faggot. His sidekick seems to exist to remind us all that slamming down whiskey by the quart at work (the boss man has a hard liquor dispensary system IN HIS OFFICE. This should be REQUIRED gear at work, for Chrissakes!) and sexually harassing every woman in sight is goddamn hilarious!

And the women…this show makes the early years of Star Trek : The Next Generation when Troi was dolled up like Mindy the Space Cheerleader look subtle and proper. If the women aren’t wearing skintight uniforms, they’re wearing skintight SILVER uniforms with purple hair (this seems to be the uniform of all women working at the moonbase…in one hilariously weird scene, the female commander goes to her quarters to relax. This seems to consist of removing the legs from her silver pants and the sleeves from her shirt…leaving her looking like she’s ready to serve up beers at Moon Hooters, then attaching some sort of microskirt to her booty shorts and heading to the lounge, where she gets the lone black character to fetch her a coffee). And wherever they are, there’s pervy the sidekick macking on every single one of them (What is up…and I do mean UP…with 70′s tits, by the way? They look like missiles ready to launch from tops at a moment’s notice, for fuck’s sake! Has gravity increased since then?). And don’t worry ladies, for you there are the crews of the submarines…dudes wearing mesh netting for shirts.

Anyway, the show is HILARIOUS despite the somewhat lameness of the aliens themselves…blue painted people wearing what look like those old school diving gear helmets and silver backpacks like mommy packed them off to school 20,000 leagues under the sea packing standard issue assault rifles. They can’t POSSIBLY hope to compete with SHADO, what with their submarines that launch aircraft, moon base structures that bear a strong resemblance to volleyballs attached with tinkertoy tunnels, satellite names SID (Space Invader Detector) that speaks in a quirky British accent (Pip pip, Dave…) and phones everywhere…and I do mean EVERYWHERE…in the opening scene, a car escort ON A MOTORBIKE warns the driver of the car of impending UFO (or U-Foe, as they’re called in the show) attack by telling him through the phone wired to his handlebar assembly. Every inch of this show is wonderful, cheezy splendor, and I encourage EVERYONE to go get it for themselves!

In other ‘thrilling’ news of what I’m up to, I’ve been replaying old games for some reason. Now, I’m not talking ancient stuff…I’m talking recent stuff that I’ve recently been replaying again. Blasted my way through FEAR once more, and quite enjoyed it. Unfortunately, there is no way to get around SecuROM installation on the first expansion, so I didn’t bother with it…but I did play the second one for the first time. Ever play a game that you are convinced hates you? That was this. It wasn’t bad for the first while…then came the last couple levels, where the designers had apparently decided they couldn’t stand paying customers and stuffed them so full of uber-enemies that I am convinced there is NO way to finish it sans cheatery. Always delightful when levels show such a startling lack of creative interest they’re just rammed full of supervillains. I’m going to give Company of Heroes another try…perhaps I was too harsh with it the first time…or perhaps I’ve enjoyed playing through the original Warhammer 40k : Dawn of War series (by the same developer) so much that my attitude towards it has softened. Who knows? I DO know that, while I don’t mind the limited base building in Dawn of War, it still seems utterly retarded to me that I can clone infantry and build tanks in 13 seconds in the shed out back in France in 1944.

Found another geektacular strategy game company called Magitech. They remind me a LOT of Koei back in the day, actually…remember Koei? Nobunaga’s Ambition, PTO, Genghis Khan, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, L’Empereur? Take those games, give them a major face lift and Total War-style real time battle simulation, and you have the work of these guys. Anyway, the one I’ve been playing the demo of is Takeda 3…try and unite Feudal Japan, using LOTS and LOTS of fucking ninjas (so far no technicolor ninja varieties…I’m hopeful, however, that American Ninja was basing that on some pastel-obsessed region of ancient Japan).  Anyway, it’s a demo, it’s free, it’s worth checking out, here’s the company website (they’ve got other intriguing stuff too…another game set in ancient, splintered China, and a third called Strength & Honor that reminds me of my beloved Genghis Khan…I guess a sequel’s in the works, so I’ll be keeping an eye on these guys).

Finally, being a fan of pinball tables I’ve been enjoying the freeware Visual Pinball. Basically, it’s a combo editor/PinMAME arcade box emulator with hundreds and hundreds of tables made for it…many of which are recreations of real tables. Anyway, you can check that out here. You do have to create an account to download anything or post in the forums, but it takes about a minute flat…and that’s if you’re a mongoloid with pencils for fingers). Download the main installer package and…well, INSTALL it. Then, look through the tables (there are 2 versions of VPinball. Version 9 is the newer one, but it’s still pretty bugged up for the most part, so stick with the Version 8 that comes in the installer for now), download the table file, unzip it and put it (it’ll be a .vpt file) in the Tables subfolder in the Pinball folder the installer made. Every table has a matching ROM file…download THAT, leave it zipped, and put the zip package in the ROMS subfolder. Done. Load it up, that table’s ready to play. Unless you spent your childhood consuming paint chips and bourbon, this is all easy. I’ll probably make another post about my personal favorite tables…sure, I’ll say it’s to point out some real gems other people should play, but it’s really me just blathering on some more about myself.

I’m just finishing off reading a collection of article Hunter S. Thompson wrote for various publications during the 80′s…always wildly entertaining, and often slightly disturbing and weird. I’m also getting ready for Fantasy Baseball season (3 teams so far…I’ll probably stick with 3.), one of which is doing a live draft, which I’ve never done with a baseball team before. So I’m spending far too much time figuring out when it’s time to stop drafting middle infielders and start loading up on pitching depth (one free tip I learned last year…get as many productive closers as you can. They produce huge points on a much more regular basis than most starting pitchers do).

There you have it…life, liberty and the pursuit of…uhhh…stuff.

BONUS MATERIAL : I had totally forgotten the one other thing I wanted to comment on, which is the trial currently underway in Sweden of the founders of The Pirate Bay! For anyone who hasn’t been following…to describe the prosecution’s case and conduct as bumbling and deficient would be an insult to mere idiots everywhere. By day TWO they dropped literally fifty percent of the charges they had brought to court. On day THREE the MPAA’s pet lawyer tried to introduce new evidence in questioning…which is a legal no no…and when banned from doing so, tried to shout down the damn judge! On day FOUR ANOTHER lawyer tried to introduce evidence in questioning and was promptly scolded by the judge (this seems weird to me…so far as I know, it’s a pretty common legal reg that you cannot introduce new evidence in questioning without letting the defense first see it…so how are these Keystone Cops fucking this up so often???). As of day 7, the ‘Anti Piracy’ experts have so far been torn to shreds. One admitted that he had no real idea how bittorrent even works, and that he had no idea if The Pirate Bay was even an active tracker for any of the ‘test torrents’ he had downloaded. The other was forced to confess that, while claiming to be and impartial expert for the prosecution, he is in fact paid by the RIAA…and also has no clue what the Hell he’s talking about. As well, one of the lawyers (AGAIN,the crazy bitch working for the MPAA…prior to the case being read, a number of lawyers were asked what their estimates of the case’s outcome were…she was the only one claiming a successful prosecution. She went so far as to predict prison time. I think she’s starting to crack as she realizes that the technophobic fucksticks running the studios who employ her are about to punt her ass in to a lucrative career of asking if the customer would like fries with that.) had one of her Swedish friends actively trolling online forums for people to write letters of agreement with the prosecution’s case…call me nuts, but if you’re blindly seeking anonymous backing from Bonerman53 and PronKingASSSSSS, your case is basically fucked. Oh, to make it even BETTER, it turns out the Swedish friend has been a rather public advocate FOR The Pirate Bay before, which means those anonymous ‘support messages’ from Biggunz561 and LORDHAXORZ won’t carry quite the same ‘weight’ they would have before. (Actually, I would LOVE to see them roll in a parade of cliche ubernerd lardasses to babble on in L33tspeak in some sort of ‘support’ of the prosecutor’s flimsy paper fan of a case. One fat fucker after another oozing microwave burrito from every pore, constantly checking for Twitter updates on how that castle raid is going while they blather on and on, with the prosecution nodding along while looking at each other in confusion and asking one another in hastily written notes “Is this dork supporting us? What the FUCK is ANY of this shit he’s SAYING?!” Unfortunately,  no tech head with half a mind would back that side. Still, I can dream…)

Finally, as the icing on the cake, there’s the amusing fact that the prosecution has no conception of how a bittorrent system actually operates, and they still seem to be under the bizarre impression that somewhere in Stockholm you can find an office building for The Pirate Bay with corporate offices and a hierarchy and hundreds of vaults filled with Pirate Bay executives rolling naked in the piles of money they’ve gotten from their L33t pir8 hax. Anyway, you can read every day of the case so far, AND keep up to date on the lastest face-slappingly oafish maneuvering of the prosecution (a manatee washed up on the beach moves more sleekly than this gaggle of fucktards) HERE. (The link’s cued up to the page with Day One, and you can roll forward from there…cause that’s how I roll).

ANOTHER UPDATE : I’ve been listening to the Penny Arcade podcasts of their D&D games…quite entertaining. And the NEW one, series 2, which has 2 parts online so far, also features Will Wheaton and his constant mockery of his own character and blaming his shitty dice for bad rolls. If you’re a fellow geekish traveler, you will probably enjoy them…they’re playing 4th edition, so you get to hear some slightly different rules and stuff (I don’t remember characters having a ‘once a day’ massive attack ability before???). Anyway, you can snag them HERE. (All of the first ‘season’ can be downloaded from the bottom right. I don’t see a link to the first ‘episode’ of this 2nd run here, but it’s pretty easy to find on the site).