Tumblr has stolen all my websites updates for the last month without me even noticing. I am insanely oblivious to essentially everything.

My apologies, internet. Guess I’ll catch you up with some things;

Exterminators and Sad Robot will both be seeing updates within the week, so mark your calendars. But mark them in pencil because we all know how I am at this point. I will also be doing another experiment in donation based writing when I post my most recent novella. This is the one I was writing while in chat a few weeks ago and was forcibly made to read an excerpt from by the 20 weirdos who actually care enough about this stuff to be in a chat with me. Did I say weirdos? I mean loyal fans and comrades. In any event, the novella is finished and turned out even better than I had hoped.

I have also begun to set mechanization in motion for something sort of big. It is still in the early stages though so I can’t really talk about it, except to let you know that if you are thinking I might be starting an electronic publishing house for writers and artists of the -punk, avant garde, and extreme left nature you might be psychic.

I understand why this is kind of neat, but come on. You can’t readjust things during Tetris, that defeats the point of Tetris. This isn’t “Analog Tetris” it is “Puzzle Game With Blocks That Isn’t Tetris but Happens to be Tetris Shaped.” I really just want to keep saying Tetris. Tetris.

Tetris analógico // Analogical Tetris from Esferobite-DSK on Vimeo.

Also expect some short stories on the blog in the coming days.

Most important philosopher of our time. I don’t think a single modern human being has shaped my views on society and politics as much as George Carlin.

I’m actually surprised it took this long, but a company by the name of Look3D has just begun selling “designer” 3D glasses. Some are even Real3D certified.

This might not seem like it is a big deal because, honestly, with the way 3-D tech is being utilized it is still mostly in movie theaters or video games- two things that you can just wear a dorky pair of regular 3D glasses and not really care because as soon as you are done you are just taking them off. This isn’t how that tech is always going to be used though, and we all know sooner or later everything is going to be integrated into some weird 3D Dennou Coil. With actual snazzy looking glasses, I can be a fashionable hipster dick and still enjoy the spoils of 3D advertising and entertainment all around me- cyberpunk dystopia, here we come!

So what I’ve learned today is that if you send a bunch of guys who actually like Street Fighter out into the woods with some cameras, they will end up making something that is, without exaggeration, one billion trillion times better than any of the fucking god awful Street Fighter movies we’ve been graced with to this point. I give the original one a pass because it was campy and I was a dumb kid when I saw it, but that Legend of Chun Li nonsense was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen that wasn’t directed by Michael Bay, a GI Joe live action movie, or a Dragonball live action movie. It was just awful. Luckily, this exists now- it is only three minutes long, but it is the best three minutes of live action Street Fighter ever recorded. And yes I’m counting that Jacke Chan thing.

Okay, let’s just be serious for a minute. How awesome is Kidcrash? The answer is pretty awesome.

Yesterdays post was supposed to be about Tumblr but ended up being about me, I’m very self important and think the couple hundred people a day who read this actually give a crap about what I think about anything that isn’t video games or dick jokes, so this one is now about Tumblr.

As anybody reading this knows, I’m a social networking addict. Well, maybe not an addict, but I realize the value of having huge amounts of friends and followers on various social networking sites and how it relates to developing a following in entertainment/writing/art/etc. Plus I genuinely enjoy interacting with people and learning new things or getting to know new personalities that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to get to know. This leads to me having every single one in existence. Hell, I still log into my makeoutclub account occasionally. Mainly I stick to Facebook and Twitter though. Although, I did start a Tumblr, which any self respecting hipster doofus probably should have already, but I was late to the ball. When I started it, I had no idea what I was going to use it for. I mean, I post videos and music and all that stuff here already, so Tumblr really didn’t seem like it was going to serve a purpose.

Until I figured I would resurrect my “play a rom a day” project over there. One of the reasons I stopped doing the MaelstROM-a-day was that I simply didn’t have time to dedicate a review at the level that I would like to games that were 20 years old. Plus my style changed so drastically since the last time I did that and now, there is just no way I could balance the two. It takes me a real long time to do reviews, I mean this Mount and Blade review is taking a while because I’m teaching myself olde English for it, and my Final Fantasy XIII review still isn’t done yet because I’m waiting on some multimedia effects from a friend of mine. I don’t do normal reviews, which you may have noticed, so it takes me longer than most to get them out. This goes back to my post yesterday about being spread thin, if I just focused on reviews like a real professional it would probably only take me a day or two, but whatever.

Anyway, if you want to keep track of the new Rom-A-Day, go over to my Tumblr account and follow me! Or else.

So, as you may have noticed, I’ve been trying to raise the amount of video game writing I get into lately. I feel like I’ve heavily neglected that facet of my writing career over the last few months to focus on fiction and some silly personal life stuff that was a distraction. I guess it might be that I may have spread myself a little thin on the dream front- if you asked me right now what I was pursuing I would have a long list of things that, if you picked one at random, would be enough of a pipe dream for most people. Now me however. I know myself to well. If I stopped to focus on one of my ridiculous unattainable goals I would get bored. This even happened over the last two months with fiction. Sad Robot is well received and people really enjoyed the last one, but I am in no hurry to capitalize on that because I don’t want to fall into a routine or get burnt out on anyone thing. So I ebb and flow on what I’m doing. Whether I’m writing comic book scripts and trying to find an artist, or writing short stories and trying to finish my novel, or whether I’m running and working out to try and get in shape for wrestling school, I make sure I stay busy.

I’ve had it pointed out to me that my social life is suffering because of this, but I’m not really worried about that. I would assume everybody understands how dedicated I am to what I’m doing right now. It is hard to explain to people sometimes, because I really don’t make all that much money, and most people my age are just getting done college and starting their first real people money job. So to them, working hard and busting your ass to achieve something is only palpable to their brains if you are getting more money to do it. I, for better or for worse, don’t work like that. I don’t judge success by bank accounts, because if I did I would be a pretty miserable failure right now. Success to me isn’t how many friends you have or how much money you are making during your 40 hour work week, success to me is how happy you are with where you are in life. I’ve had some missteps, over the last year anytime I’ve tried to take any relationship further than just “hey we both hate dating but like sex, lets have some” has been a colossal trainwreck, but overall I’m the most positive person out there about what I’m doing. My life excites me, and I think a lot of people lack that. Being able to wake up and go “What am I going to do today” and having a choice of many things I enjoy and many personal goals to accomplish is amazing, even if the pay isn’t. Having opportunities to meet new people and travel all over, or just being able to do what I want and make my own schedules is all a wonderful and exciting thing. So I throw myself into my work at an incredible level and everything else kind of fades away.

I’m sure if I focused on any one thing I would get further. Maybe if I stopped working on this novel or this comic and only worked on video game journalism, I would get noticed more. Maybe if I stopped working on video game journalism and just worked on my novel, I would get it finished and in a publishers hands sooner. Maybe if I ignored both and just lifted weights all day long I would be in shape for wrestling school already. That is all probably true, but it just isn’t the direction I want my life to take. I’m spread thin, and sometimes its stressful, but mostly it isn’t because of how much I love doing everything I do.

Anyway, this blog post was originally supposed to be about Tumblr. Whoops.

Of course you do.

For those of you who aren’t gigantic dusty old bones like me and the rest of us 20 somethings, you might not remember Nick Arcade. Nick Arcade was the most frustrating show ever for video game kids, geek kids, or just kids with brains to watch, as it seemed they had to pry some of their contestants gnarled fingers loose from the very bottom of the barrel. Not to mention a host who might have been a little bit crazy, awful 90s era special effects and skits, and everybody sucking at video games. This will probably send you back to nostalgia land- a land where you are still wearing your Boba Fett underoos, eating Nintendo cereal, and getting yelled at for the very first time by your parents because you cursed at the television screen.

Whatever, dumb bitch should have known how to charge Sonic’s dash.

A bit of an explanation for this one.

A while back, I promised a friend of mine who, at the time, was serving in Iraq and trying not to get shot that I would mention him in a review since he was the only person reading my reviews at that point. Oh how things have changed now that I’m, like, so totally internet famous and all. Anyway, this was me doing just that- and of course I can’t do anything simple so it turned into the defining thread of the review. That was just for the people who had no idea what was going on, which theoretically should have been everyone except him. Still, the review is great… as usual right? I also just realized I haven’t updated my portfolio since I started writing for Ripten…. four months ago. Laziness, thy name is me.

So I really pull no punches when it comes to my views on the role of traditional heteronormative relationships in modern society. I view them as sort of a stringent control mechanism in order to keep us all in line and consuming. This may seem sort of nihilistic, but look at it from my perspective- every single person alive is completely different, yet the vast majority defines and attempts to adhere to the same definition of a relationship. Traditional relationships just don’t work for some people. Look at me? Six months ago I quit a decent paying job, forfeited my license, and moved back in with my parents so I could focus on my writing full time. That doesn’t exactly make me prime dating material, and if I tried to make a relationship work with somebody who was looking for the general type of relationship that we, as humans, have been conditioned to expect it would be an absolute miserable failure.

This isn’t to say that it doesn’t work for some people, but people who attempt to live further off the beaten path and away from most of the stuff we are supposed to be doing to be contributing members of society, more often than not pretentious weirdo artists, don’t always do well when trying to wedge themselves into the strict confines of a relationship. But they don’t know better to avoid it or to find alternatives because, from day one, they were told that the traditional relationship is the only possible relationship, which is of course inherently false. Open relationships, polygamy, “friends with benefits”, partners in crime, etc are all viable options and would probably work much better for huge swatches of people if they didn’t have the societal opinion of a relationship so burnt into their brains. I really can’t tell you how many times I’ve met a free spirited artsy girl who professed that she wasn’t into relationships and was perfectly fine with me doing the starving artist thing, only to eventually realize that I’m fully committed to my lifestyle and that she probably won’t ever be able to change that. This is usually when they end up banging an IT guy, a scientist, or in one bizarre case, a glitch DJ. I don’t ever blame the girl in these instances as much as I blame how they were conditioned. I find that they really, really want to share the same anti-traditional views on relationships that I have, or even they want to experiment with a new type of relationship to see if it is for them, but in the end they revert back to the way society taught them to act towards relationships.

And really, you can see this for yourself. Look at any number of your friends who aren’t the tie wearing/name tag having types. The odds are they are embroiled in a normal relationship or yearning for it. Why? When all relationships are expected to follow the same routines and same structure, why would people who do nothing but eschew and push away from routine and structure feel it is necessary to put themselves into that situation when there are so many other alternatives? It is something I often struggle with thinking about, mostly because I’m still not entirely clear either. This may seem like a pragmatic view on relationships, but “I’m only human” and occasionally fall into the hopeless romantic trap and think that being entirely committed to somebody else in a traditional sense doesn’t sound too bad. It always ends badly though, as you most likely have figured out already.

Anyway, that might seem like a super serious post considering the video I’m linking to is of animated sprites showing what happens after you actually rescue the princess in a video game, but in all honesty this is a fantastic representation of the way I view the traditional relationship. If you think that seems cold, emotionless, stereotypical, or any other thing- take a step back and look at the progression of your own relationships and see if they were really any different.

We are all just consumers, remember?

So now you know this exists.

It is a bar in Vienna that is designed to look just like your rectum! It gives a whole new meaning to the term “getting shitfaced” doesn’t it? Eh! Eh! Get it!

Alright I’ll just stop now.

Rectum Bar

We can all just sit down and acknowledge that something catastrophic is going to happen soon, right? Maybe not some 2012 Nostradamus nonsense, but seriously. The last, lets say, year has just been preparing various areas of the world for inevitable Armageddon. The North East, and other areas, suffered through the most ridiculously hectic winter in decades- nearly being murdered with snow. Earthquakes destroyed like, what, half the planet and lead to nearly a trillion awful celebrity fundraisers. A while ago, a weird beam of light was seen over Norway but was dismissed as a failed Russian missile experiment, but then Russia had their own oddity when a Pyramid shaped UFO hovered over the Kremlin, even though I’m pretty sure that is fake. The Volcano That Fucked Europe, however, is decidedly real, and something that hasn’t happened for hundreds of years.

Then, there was the massive fireball that turned night time into day over the Midwest. Of course, this was just a surprisingly large meteor burning up in the atmosphere. This is actually a common occurrence, but I doubt it is common for it to be that ridiculously apocalyptic looking. Then, just to top things off, the SUN EXPLODED.

Now, ok, obviously the sun didn’t explode. It was a solar eruption, something the sun tends to do from time to time because of how volatile the gasses that make up our light giving main squeeze actually are. Still, this was the largest one in 15 years, and by a lot. That explosion right there is large enough to fit 126 of our humble planets into it.

So, really, with all this stuff happening, what is next? It has to be the end of the world right? I mean none of these things are explainable occurrences that have happened many times before and only seem more drastic because of how short human history and memory actually is in comparison to how long our world and the universe itself has existed, right? Look everybody, we all knew this was going to happen eventually. Don’t you watch the Discovery or History channels? Anytime they talk about something, whether it be a volcano or the tectonic plates or meteors, they end up ending it with “Oh yeah, this happens every couple of thousand yeards- but we are wayyyyy overdue now.” This isn’t just alarmist nonsense in order to make the shows more dramatic. Well, I mean it is alarmist nonsense that makes the shows more dramatic, but it isn’t just that. The truth is that a whole lot of crap that could be happening and routinely has happened in the Earth’s history is pretty much going to happen in our lifetimes. The only thing we can hope for is that instead of a meteor crushing us all, the dead rise up and attack.

Now, hear me out. If tomorrow they put out a census that said “Ok everybody, we had a great run, but it is time for the world to end. You all get to vote on how though! Cheers!” the only logical option would be a zombie apocalypse. This isn’t a matter of preference, but of fact. A zombie apocalypse gives us all our best chance of surviving and rebuilding society. If a meteor hits, we are all dead. If a nuclear war breaks out, we are all dead and the ones that aren’t have to live in a Bethesda game, if Yogi Bear inadvertently makes the Yellowstone Caldera explode, we are all screwed. However, if zombies become real, we’ve got a fighting chance. See, where as all the other Armageddons would wipe out everybody, a zombie apocalypse would create more of a population bottleneck- which is something that has happened before in human history. Zombies would just be doing what evolution probably has planned for us anyway.

So next month when you get your end of the world census form, please vote for zombies and not the sun blowing up. Thank you.

Zombies For Acceptable Armageddon in 2012.

Geekologie, the blog where I steal find most of the material I post here when I can’t think of anything smarty pants or interesting to talk about. Or when I’m just hungover/stoned and too lazy to write anything of substance. Since everybody on the internet loves infographs now, this was a super relevant one I figured you would all enjoy. It is a break down of World of Warcraft over many factors.

Now, I don’t like 99% of MMOs, and I tend to get a decent amount of hate mail because of this. My reasoning is that I don’t generally enjoy games that ask for a huge monetary/time investment with very little reward. I understand that, to the people who play and enjoy WoW, the reward is the general entertainment the game provides along with the community you can be a part of. That isn’t what I look for in a game though. I just don’t put too much weight in a community in the sense that WoW has one, and I prefer games I can actually be better than somebody at because of my competitive nature as an alpha male (ladies know this is true ;) ). What I mean by that is, in WoW your skill is directly proportionate with the amount of time you put into the game. While this isn’t necessarily that different in comparison to games like Counter-Strike or StarCraft, obviously the more you play the better you are, I feel as if it is still different. In Bad Company 2, when I shoot people in the face it feels like a rewarding accomplishment, when I play most MMOs, killing mobs does not feel like the accomplishment it should. Obviously I’m in the minority, since seventeen gajillion people play WoW, but it is an opinion I can’t shake and that extends to all MMOs.

Still, even with that said, the rise of the MMO has a genre has been impressive, and this infograph helps plug that one home. Right into your brain. With info. And graphs.

Click the picture for the full size dealie.

I, like any good politician, only use my birthday to advance my own personal agenda. Luckily for you, dear reader, my agenda includes awesome screamo music. Yes, the socialist screamo agenda rears its ugly head again. I make no bones that it is my preferred genre, and it is really the only genre of music that I consider myself knowledgeable about. Outside of it, my musical taste is pretty dramatically awful. And by that, I mean my musical taste is awesome and everybody else is just made entirely of stupid atoms that have fused together to make them stupid.

The alternate title for this was “I’m Never Calling it Skramz so Shut the Fuck Up and Stop Saying Skramz.”

01. i not dance – of mice and men
02. Gay for Johnny Depp – Lights Out
03. Submission Hold – Blue Light Special
04. Mr. Willis Of Ohio – Gläserner Mensch
05. Hot Cross – In Memory Of Morvern
06. Honeywell – If…
07. Pg. 99 – My Application To Heaven
08. You And I – nights like these
09. Song Of Zarathustra – Find A Grave
10. Vuur – Bitter
11. Tipping Canoe – Waking Crows
12. Reversal Of Man – Assembly
13. A Flower Kollapsed – Crocodile Two Meters Long… 3,3 Meters Long
14. Gameness – Misconduction
15. 1905 – Your Wrong
16. Envy – Off
17. What Price, Wonderland – Selfish Minutes
18. Spires – The Bitters

Download

I feel like eating one of these will help contribute to the downfall of America. I will certainly be purchasing one.

I should point out that I love the fact the advertising campaign for this entire thing consists of one goal-

Convince People It Actually Exists.

When you create a food item that is so patently ridiculous that, during your marketing meeting, one of the main things you figure that you have to do is make sure everybody knows that this is a real product and not some comedians newest joke or a Something Awful photoshop contest for “Quickest Way To Make Your Insides Turn to Gelatin” you know you are on to something. I can only imagine the meeting;

“Wait, what the fuck are they doing. Fried chicken instead of bread, and cheese and bacon in the middle? Jesus Christ. Alright, well we’ve got a job to do. Are we sure this thing is real? This could just be them fucking with us again like when they had us market that bowl of slop with all the food just mixed in together in a colorless mass. Wait, what Johnson? You mean THAT was real too? Holy shit. I’m going to go to the lunchroom and eat a gun.”

It also doesn’t hurt that the whole campaign seems menacing. Like maybe KFC is trying to scare you away from actually eating it. It is possible that this is created by the devil himself as a way too steal our souls through grease, and the KFC marketing department is attempting to prevent that from happening. “ITS REAL” “THE DOUBLEDOWN IS COMING” “REPENT FOR YOUR SINS”

Posted under Internet

So I should point out I’m kind of a weird guy. I wouldn’t say I’m crazy, not normally at least. I have pretty stable and pragmatic views on everything except for possibly my strong liberal leanings and my desire to see reliance on religion removed from our realm of reason. Everything else I do and say is generally just geeky, but not crazy. That is, except for things that revolve around my writing. You, dear reader, have probably gleaned by now from my reviews and fiction, plus my posts on the process by which I write, that I’m a little bit nuts when it comes to my “art” if you will.

One of these things are my recent reliance on sleep deprivation to get through particularly tough bits of writing.

Yeah, I know, I know. Unhealthy and the exact opposite of what you are “supposed” to do before you start writing. Usually around the 48 hour mark, which I’m staring down right now, I start to write and see what happens. Generally nothing too interesting, and then I pass out. This time, however, I’m attempting to make it three days without sleep before I even start to write. It is a bit of an experiment to see what my brain does with fiction, more out of curiosity than any real function. Actually, more often than not, the stuff I do write during a battle with anti-sleep usually ends up being incoherent, but the last entry in the Sad Robot saga was finished after breaking through the 36 hour mark and it turned out incredibly well even for me.

I find the brain to be fascinating, and I like experimenting with my own. Lacking sleep can cause incredible cognitive disability, not to mention hallucinations, aches, pains, an inability to accurately heal, and various other things that really aren’t too pleasant. But I find that near delirium focusing. You have to stay engaged and active or else your brain is just going to go “ok man, fuck this, bed time” and shut you down either for half a day of sleep or something they call ‘microsleep’ which is kind of a cross between a blackout and a minute long power nap.

Another reason I like using sleep deprivation as a writing tool is because of the effect sleep has on your prefontal cortex. For those who aren’t brain dorks, the prefontal cortex is the part of your brain that controls things like morality, societal control, expectations, knowledge of consequences, and decision making. Long story short- it fucks up your personality and goals. This does interesting things to writing. With the ability to judge what your consequences your actions will have, it makes it harder to think of things like rewriting or even the story making any sense. That might not sound great, but for somebody like me who has Constant Rewrite Disorder it helps to see what my brain wants to do with a story without the rest of me trying to restart and rewrite things- it is a removal of a filter. It also makes it so you kind of step out of yourself for a bit. My stuff is usually weird and dark, but Sad Robot is kind of light and silly, so it was necessary for me to get out of my own brain to finish the last entry and focus myself on being able to “think” that way for future entries. I’m more curious to see what a more extreme time of sleep deprivation (3+ days) will do to my writing. I doubt I’ll start drifting into psychosis or writing House of Leaves 2 or anything, but the idea of lacking the ability to second guess what I write even at a basic level interests me deeply.

Essentially I am telling you all this as a warning. If anything gets posted from this point forward, it is probably going to be interesting.

Hevisaurus is a Finnish Dinosaur metal band.

Like Christmas morning, Red Letter Media gives us the newest installment of “crazy dude reviewing shitty movies: the series” and it is just as amazing as one would expect considering how great the Phantom Menace review was. I enjoy this one more because, despite how awful Phantom Menace was, I too find this to be the worst of all the Star Wars movies. I would rather fuck an Ewok and spoon Jar Jar than ever have to watch this one again. My plan is to replace the DVD copies of these movies I have with the reviews this guy puts out.

Fuck you George Lucas.

This is only the first part of NINE. I’m sure you are savvy enough to find the rest. Hopefully.