actuality.log

Except that they’re comedy shows and an album instead.

But first. It took me a really long time (50+ hours) and I only finished about 84% of the content (the game actually keeps an internal log of what fraction of the game world you’ve truly explored), but I finally finished Metroid Prime. It was awesome overall, though the ending was a little disappointing.

<SPOILER>

The story starts with famed interstellar bounty hunter Samus Aran having to go to a planet and destroy an evil creature. Sure enough, the end of the game is when she destroys said creature. The sad part is, there is no glorious ending, she “just leaves” the planet, in a totally professional fashion.

I wanted more of a melodramatic and story-filled ending. Not the equivalent of a 1930s “GAME OVER” screen.

</SPOILER>

Anyway, finishing the game gave me the time time to check out other forms of entertainment, and here are my reviews:

1. “It’s always sunny in Philadelphia”, on FX: I like it. I really do. The cast is primarily composed of the creators and writers, so they don’t look as awesome as regular casts, but I laugh. A lot.

2. “Starved”, on FX: I hate it. I really do. This show is always paired up with the previous one, because it too features its creators in starring roles and is on FX. But it is so… I don’t know the word, probably pathetic. Firstly, it makes fun anorexics, bulimics, anorexic-chocaholics, sexaholics, obese-food-addicts, … . I have no problem with this sort of picking-on-people-with-genuine-issues grade of humour… if it is done right. This show just degrades quickly to cheap gimmicks and some somewhat-serious undertones, which just sickens me. Please don’t watch it, and FX, please cancel it.

OK, losing someone you really love to an eating disorder probably has something to do with it too. Anyway, knowing FX and Fox are so related, they’ll probably cancel the funny show and leave the crappy one running.

3. “Mind of Mencia”, on Comedy Central: I love it. Just as “Starved” tries (and fails) making fun of certain classes of people, Mencia picks on certain (racially decided) classes of people, and does it well. It makes me laugh. Poking fun at hispanics is more of an icing.

4. “Too late with Adam Corolla”, on Comedy Central: I reeeeally hate this show. Adam wasn’t funny in the “Man Show”, and he isn’t funny now. Joke after joke continue to bomb (not a peep even from the studio audience, EVEN WITH THIER “APPLAUD NOW” PLACARDS). At least the jiggling women in the “Man Show” distracted most from noticing the lack of humour.

5. “X&Y”, Cold Play: Everyone who’s anyone, including me, loves to denigrate their music using words like “But Chris is whiny” or “It’s a little gay”. But this album is actually quite alright. Actually, just like all the others, the generally-overhyped-album does have one stellar song that makes the 12 dollars spent worthwhile. For me, it’s “Fix You”. That song is just so awesome, Cold Play is forgiven for its otherwise not-rough-enough, not-rockstary-enough image.

If you’re curious, the other two songs from their previous albums that did the same thing were “High Speed” and “Amsterdam”.

God they’re lucky.

I normally resort to penile and other technically-lewd means when I’m unable to elicit laughs in other ways. It is a weakness I will overcome…

another day.

I was reading on the BBC about how Durex plans on coming up with a line of extra-large condoms, you know, for all those well endowed South African men.

From the article “This could help condoms become cool,” he said. “Men will buy them to boost their ego.”

Silly people, size doesn’t matter…

if you’re a lesbian.

In response to an earlier comment. Because you might as well reuse what you type.

Let me start by saying the last post was an exaggeration based off of facts I made up. (As I always do, and will proceed to do in the following. It’s more fun that way.) The only opinion (not different from fact, for me, as explained above) I’m trying to put across is that people here, in large proportions, clearly don’t care about anything that happens outside their little bubble. As a result, they lack a clear understanding of most issues.

This is pretty much everybody, I don’t mean some hicks in some small town. I will be having a conversation with a seemingly normal person, and suddenly she’ll refer to communist+dictatorships in the same sentence, for example. As in refer to them believing they are one and the same thing. Even after much persuasion, it is hard to explain one is a kind of economy and the other is a form of governance, they don’t imply each other and they aren’t “inherently evil”. What does the average person know? They know east Europe, and that they were “enemies” and most of them were “commie dictatorships”. This, by the way, is an example of someone who I think has an above average world view.

The root problem? They don’t know because they don’t care, or sometimes even acknowledge the presence of a world outside theirs. What am I basing that on? Pretty much everything I see. It’d be impossible to enumerate them all, so I’ll pick few very different situations:

»News: Earthquake in, say, Somalia. Tens of thousands dead. You know what shows up on the news? “Local newscaster to have third baby”. And, as an after thought, they will (probably) casually mention other horrific events in different parts of the world, as the 43^rd item on the list.

»Sport: People in this country play games no one else in any other part of the world cares about, have a local set of leagues, have a “champion”, and go about referring to them as “world champions”. Don’t they understand there is a difference between this country and the world?

»REALITY TV: Even picking a more intelligent show (carefully hand picked—out of context—for effect) like the “Amazing Race”, you have characters who end up in foreign lands and scream at the locals for not understanding English! Sure it’s not representative of everybody, it’s just three or four people. But even one person is one person too many.

In the end, that’s all I am trying to say. I always tack on the “please be good to geeks”, because I am one (and I can correlate anything to people ogling over people other than geeks). Therefore I tried to tie it in by saying, if “you people” took as much time (doing something useful) as you do obsessing over what is happening between beautiful people (say Brad and Jen), the world will be a better place.

Unrelated site update: After years (literally) of sitting in some corner of bits of paper, I’ve uploaded some testimonials.

Judging by the kinds of topics I frequently bring up, one would hastily tend to assume I am this callous shallow person without a modicum of regard for anything truly deep—and you wouldn’t be very far off the mark. But sporadically, I do ponder over non-self-centered substantive issues, and I do form strong opinions on them.

Today just happens to be one of those days. And you, my lovelies, happen to be the lucky audience.

I’ve been in this country, now, for exactly three years. This country, which abundantly touts itself the land of opportunity, the home of the free, the blessed land of milk and bee regurgitated nectar… you know. In these three years, I’ve had ample opportunity to carefully observe these people, their culture, and society as a whole in an attempt to answer everyone’s favourite question—what’s the deal with this country?

The full blown answer to that question is incredibly verbose and tedious, so I’ll highlight the two fundamental problems which are, not surprisingly, inherently connected. For one, society as a whole is incredibly inward looking. And the second, being smart is not deemed cool. That’s it. I’ve ingeniously distilled all of society’s woes down to derivatives of these two, which in turn share a common root.

To delve a bit into the details, I’ll briefly get into each of these issues, starting with the second one because it is easier to understand, even if I can’t condone it—Being smart is not cool, while being dumb is perfectly acceptable. For example, the average parent here would rather their kid hit a home run in a little league game than get an A in a math test. It gets worse. Hitting the home run and failing the test is great, while not hitting the home run (a failure in sport) and topping the class makes you a geek—uncool. I am not saying being good at sports is bad, just that it needs to be instilled in kids that being well(-enough) read and knowledgeable about things going on is ALSO cool, or at least positive.

Somewhat related to this is our first problem—society as a whole is terribly inward looking—as a direct consequence of ignorance, because knowing stuff is uncool. For the most part, the average person doesn’t know or care about anything outside the confines of their daily existence. You might say this is normal and expected. It is, IF all you do is go about living your life in that little confine. That is in no way the way this country goes about its business. As in it is NOT OK if the average person (and the ones they elect to make major decisions) is retarded like so, and the country goes into war (as an example) and what not trying to impose its whim on nations whose culture it doesn’t bother to understand.

So, in effect, rather than care to understand why people in regions of the world hate them, they proceed to (as they always tend to do) declare these people “hate them for no apparent reason”, or better yet “hate their free way of life”.

I have news for you. No one hates your “freedom”. They hate you. They hate you for effecting arbitrary decisions like the setting up of Israel by displacing people from their existing homes in Palestine.

I don’t have a problem with absolute, indiscriminate (ab)use of power in an attempt to impose one’s views on the rest of the community. If the person doing the imposing is intelligent, it is in everyone’s (the common stupid man) interest to follow orders for a global good. What is NOT OK is attempt to impose views, not realize you’re doing it, have people hate you, not realize you’re causing the hate, and then proceed to follow through with other similar policies and wonder why people hate you so much.

That’s just retarded. Read up on some history or something. Then go out and do whatever it is you do with full and extreme force. Again, I have no problem with extreme violence or anything, as long as the violent party is intelligent about it, and know what it is doing, and why.

So the next time you’re about to exclaim “Just what is the fucking deal with this country?”, calm down, and cheerfully mutter (like you mean it) “Geeks are so sexy”. You know you’ve done your good deed for the day as the kiddies proceed to stay informed in an attempt to impress you. The operative words being “stay” and “informed”.

Good job.

Since I’m having difficulty coming up with topics of conversation—where by “conversation” I mean a scheme where I talk and you listen—I decided to revert to old faithful staples.

I begin with a question. Not a rhetorical question, a serious one. Do women intentionally over-sway their hips when they walk? Or is it one of those natural nature-clearly-prefers-women and loves-to-give-them-trance-inducing-power-over-men stunts I see so often?

If you got that one, here’s another. It’s about pee, so you probably shouldn’t be reading this if you don’t want to. Is it so wrong that some males just prefer peeing sitting down? Or is this just another one of those situations where you can’t win? You sit down, you get laughed at. You stand, you aren’t accurate enough, you end up getting it where you didn’t plan to, and you and you get mocked again. Just great.

What? Put off by questions that don’t follow, what you declare, “appropriate decorum”? Fine. Here are conversation excerpts from the past few weeks, especially picked because I never in my life thought I’d hear them.

“I really need to go. Got to shave my legs. It’s been so long, it’s not even stubbly anymore, it’s getting soft”.

“Anyone who’s even contemplating combing over should shave their heads. Women love shaved heads.”

“That last bus driver was a great shag”.

“Hey, is that a white hair I see on your head? You want me to pluck it for you?”

“Doing the worm reeeally hurt. The last time I tried it, it went well. But I was 9, and hadn’t hit puberty yet.”

After all my travels and what not, I’ve returned home actually motivated to get some work done. Now, being motivated doesn’t necessarily imply a lot of work is being done. It just means I am excited about trying.

Sometime at the end of this month or early the next, I have a semi-major exam in which I present my preliminary research proposal. Unsurprisingly, it’s called the “preliminary examination”. So a bulk of my time from now until then should go toward getting things ready for that. Of course, the operative word there being “should” and I’m actually spending much of my waking moments playing Metroid Prime.

(On a side note, if you have a GameCube, you must buy and play Metroid Prime. If you don’t, you must buy a GameCube, and then follow the above instructions. I cannot begin to describe how freaking awesome it is (yes, as good as Windwaker), and I will reserve spewing tons of well deserved praise for another day.)

Returning to our original stream of thought, after this exam (as in if I pass) I will be officially a PhD candidate. You know, the guys who don’t go to class and lurk around in coffee shops. You know, the ones in all black and shaggy facial hair and pseudo-intellectual eyewear. Yes, I will officially be recognized as one of “those guys”.

That’s pretty much it from the real-life end. That, and during the limited time my mom was around, she kept getting me a ton of random-yet-extremely-useful things, and now, living at home is a lot more fun.

I’d forgotten the joys of spending hours meticulously filing my nails.

Oh, and I haven’t eaten a meal out in a long time. Which is a huge change for me, considering I hadn’t eaten a meal at home in over a year. Just as everything else in life, I don’t use recipes or any empirical rules. I just “wing it”, and things turn out fine each time. Every single time. I am just as surprised as I am proud. All those years of vaguely hanging around the kitchen rather than playing outside or whatever has its uses.

I can try to lie that this change is brought about by my need to be creative and try new things in a totally different environment — the kitchen — but the truth is I have absolutely no money, and eating out every single meal isn’t a viable option.

At least until the travel reimbursements roll in.

Is he dead? Is he missing? Is Texas really as bad as everyone imagines it to be? Is he busy? Is he scrounging around for motivation to write? Is he just fucking lazy?

Is it that delineate is generating the requisite 1000-1500 site-wide hits per day he would otherwise be whoring for? Isn’t he taking his already-paltry loyal readerbase for granted?

In short — no, no, definitely not the parts I saw, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, and thank you.