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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

If there is one thing better than Arnold one liners, it is 160 Arnold one liners all mashed together and completely out of context. I could have used more Total Recall parts, but I say that about any video I see on the internet. Puppies cuddling? Needs more Total Recall. Sneezing panda? More Total Recall. Guy shoving a bottle up his ass and it breaking and then he has to dig the glass out? Total Recall.

What the fuck.

I would just like to point out this little invention. It is the Cravendale Milk Jug, and it tells you whether or not the milk in the jug is fresh milk in the jug or spoiled milk in the jug. This actually exists. It is apparently some super fancy scientific thing that some dudes figured out while they were researching the bacteria that actually makes milk sour, and it does it by having what is essentially a PH detector in it that is calibrated to make the screen on the front say “Sour” when the PH balance is off. Thank god. Because if there was one thing in this world that I found difficult, it was telling whether or not milk was sour. Sight and smell just weren’t cutting it.

Welcome to the future everybody. It’s name is Cravendale.

Hell has frozen over. College Humor actually did something interesting.

This is, obviously, a parody of Empire State of Mind but with Star Wars. Probably not blazing any new ground or anything as parody material goes, but the production and quality of everything involved is actually way above what I’ve come to expect from a site that caters almost entirely towards the lanyard crowd. Worth it almost entirely for breakdancing Stormtroopers, but the Princess Leia chick isn’t exactly hard on the eyes either.

Seriously though, this is pretty great. Did I lose cool points for liking this? I didn’t even know I had any left.

“I made wearing black more famous than that JayZ kid” is actually a great line. Where the hell did this come from?

Seriously. Look at that. It is so beautiful, and entirely right.

I can’t speak for the other categories, but I feel like it explains things pretty well based on the actions of our little internet subculture. For example, I do generally refer to myself as a geek and feel like this diagram represents me fairly well. I’m a pretty smart guy when it comes to most subjects, although my lack of practical knowledge in science or mathematics tends to hurt my geek score a bit, but I am fairly obsessive about the things I am geeky about. However, despite this, I’m a social person. What I’m saying is that they should change that cross section to say “Gavin is Awesome” and all the other ones to say “Not as Awesome as Gavin.”

Still, my inflated self worth aside, it is accurate. The thing is that, while there are still a large amount of stereotypical geeks, geek culture seems to be seeping its ooze into the mainstream. I’m sure people bitch about that, the same way people bitch about “hipsters” or indie rock being subsidized by major record labels, but I personally see no issue with it. Look at it from my perspective, I grew up in a small, shitty New Jersey town where nobody had good taste in anything. When I went to high school, which was a thousand years ago now, there were very few of us who knew anything about bands like Hot Cross or Saetia or Pavement, and there were even fewer people who were into stuff like computer gaming. Hell, video games weren’t even as pervasive as they are now when you think about it. And that was only about ten years ago (fuck I really didn’t want to think about that). Even when I was in high school I saw things start to change. Back then it really pissed me off because so much of my teenage identity was invested in being unique and off the beaten path, but that desire to be unique started to shed away for two reasons. One was the internet, it was always really easy to find groups of people who were into the things I was into, and two was my desire to surround myself with people who I could have discussions about theoretical physics and ROM hacking with.

Now look at today, even if you are the most normal dude in the world and all you listen to is Nickleback and all you play is Modern Warfare 2, the odds are a good amount of your friends still do geeky things. It is just that those things aren’t considered geeky anymore. The entire hipster subculture, as infuriating as it may be to most people, is really becoming the dominant culture of 20 somethings. Most of these hipsters are geeks, or dorks, or nerds, or what have you. They are Star Wars fans, and avid Dungeons and Dragons players. They hacked their Droids so they could play SNES games on it while they waited for their cappuccinos at their favorite hole in the wall coffee shop. They use Linux. And they aren’t a minor subsect of culture, they are a large group. Throw a rock at a crowd of people from the ages of 19-33 and the odds are you are going to hit more hipsters and geeks than even the Jersey Shore lanyard wearing guido types.

This is a good thing. This means we won.

Sure, it might be annoying that now your opinion on what Genesis RPG is the best won’t be some unique or earth shattering idea anymore, but wouldn’t you rather be able to say “I loved Langrisser” and have people chime in, even if it is disingenuous, than have some dude in a pink shirt call you a fag and slam a beer bong? I personally think so. Culture has shifted, and the geeks and weirdo music fans are all on top. Enjoy it while you can.

Who knew?

This is an almost cripplingly depressing piece of Japanese performance art about a robot. It isn’t a sad robot in the way that Sad Robot is a sad robot, but it is certainly enough to make you do that wistful sigh before you click the x and start watching porn again.

Seriously. They will.

So I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that if you are reading this blog because of my video game writing, or even on the rare chance you read this blog because of my fiction, you are probably not a huge Gorgoroth fan. I tend to skew hipster, which I’m fine with, but you might need a quick walkthrough before you watch this half an hour long documentary. Gorgoroth are the most stereotypical black metal band of all time. Are you a normal dude who loves Dethklok? This is them in real life. They have played on stage with severed sheep heads and more blood than a Miike film. This documentary is based mostly on their lead singer Gaahl. Gaahl is one of the most feared people in Norway. Seriously. He has done jailtime for torturing people.

This is so surreal at times you won’t have any idea if this guy is serious.

He is.

I make no bones about the fact I believe Battlestar Galactica, regardless of fairly odd ending, is the best sci-fi drama in ever. So when I saw a video involving some internet hero editing scenes from Galactica to mirror the Beastie Boys’ iconic Sabotage, I kind of thought “Hey, I’ll post that on my blog even though every other blog on the internet has it posted too.”

So here it is.