Creep Deprivation

A wise man once said that the easiest way to fix something is to break it so hard that it becomes fixed again. Actually, I believe it was said by a most curious man made entirely of grass clippings, who rode through my house on a glitterific unicycle not to long ago. He seemed pretty wise to me, so I've decided to follow his advice. Results so far have been inconclusive, as the police managed to wrestle me away from the drifter that I was trying to pound back to life before my research bore any fruit. Wait, is "I killed a drifter" humor in line with this blog's sensibilities? I have a feeling that corpse mutilations is one of those things that wouldn't make the cut if my mentally faculties were fully intact. Then again, I'd hope that a full intactness of my mental faculties would prevent me from wasting my time in the first place, but whatever.

Anyway, the thing that I'm trying to fix through egregious breaking is my sleep schedule. As hinted at in my previous post, I'm currently engaging in spring break. But through some cruel joke of fate, spring break doesn't last forever. My sleep schedule was immediately and ruthlessly screwed on my very first day of spring break, and it certainly hasn't gotten any better since. I've been going to bed at hours around 5 AM for most of break, and I'm going to have to start waking up at around 8 AM for college. It doesn't take a math major to tell that this is a recipe for bad times (though a culinary arts degree might help). So, in order to outwit my body, I've decided that, instead of falling asleep tonight, I'll just stay up all night, then fall asleep at a reasonable hour the next day. Now that's what I call strategy!

Clearly, trying to be productive during this time would be a fool's errand. I can hardly be productive when I'm firing on all cylinders, (This is just a metaphor. It's not like I actually have cylinders  like I'm some kind of engine, because that would mean I'm a robot, and we all know that's impossible and ridiculous and you should be ashamed for thinking that) so trying to get anything done when I'm mega-tired is laughable at best, and also laughable at worst, because laughable is really the only adjective up to the task of describing this. So, instead, I'm doing this. You know how everything you say is super-hilarious at 5:00 AM? That must mean that it's the perfect time to write for the internet, because we all know that it's because of an increase in quality, rather than a decrease in standards that causes this phenomenon.

So now I have get to the most difficult part of the post: thinking of something to write about. I've already explained my situation, and my content manager is reasonable enough to be asleep right now. There is literally nothing more that I can say about Virtue's Last Reward that isn't a spoiler. I've talked way too goddamned much about Fire Emblem. There's nothing interesting to say about my intricately arranged collection of buzzard scalps. It seems I am at an impasse

Well, my content manager recently convinced me to write a "stream of consciousness"  piece, where I basically just typed out whatever I found in my head. The problem with this is that I can type far faster than I can think, so the process kind of ground to a halt. I deleted it, but I can't say it was too funny, so you're not missing much.

And now here I am, at 5:00 PM, and I'm hardly tired at all. Why, I could probably go days without sleeping! You heard it here first, folks: sleep is just a trick by the government, trying to steal your free time. Every time you fall asleep, President Obama gets a dollar richer, and he uses that dollar to buy the dreams of orphans, which he then messily devours as his nourishment. In fact, I'd say that this lack of sleep is enhancing my reasoning capabilities. There is absolutely no way that I'd be able to pierce this shadowy conspiracy after a morning of being tired and cranky. In fact, I think I'm going to take this opportunity to solve all the world's problems. Buckle up, because it's about to get genius in here.

First of all: A cure for cancer. Easy enough. Criminalize all sexual activity from September 22 to October 22. This will be enforced by highly skilled "sex police". I doubt that I need to further expound on what they do. Any outliers can be handled by a special offspring task force. Kind of like Fahrenheit 451, but with live human infants instead of books. That's kind of messed up.

Or, we could just tell them that The Moon isn't  even a planet.

The energy crisis. Well, if there's anything I've learned from my physics class, it's that to deal maximum damage to your professor's head, you're going to want to throw a large object, buy you're also going to want it to have high velocity, to maximize kinetic energy. But the second most important thing is that everything is relative. Sure, you may be stationary with respect the ground, which means that you have zero kinetic energy. But you could be moving at about 30,000 m/s with respect to the sun. So, if you have a mass of, say, 72 kg, you would have a kinetic energy of about 3*10^10 J, which is about 10 times more than the energy consumption of the average clothes dryer in a single year. Doesn't that make you feel better about energy? You're like 10 clothes dryers hurtling through space!

I can't get a girl. Wait, what? Who let that in the list of problems? One, that isn't even a problem. Logicians the world over have derived many proofs for the statement that if one is of the female sex, that individual may be assumed to be psychologically impaired, a result often shortened to "Bitches be crazy". Two, I very definitely could, but I know of good reasons not to, so I don't. Tired me is a deceptive asshole. Don't listen to him.

Pic Unrelated

Global Warming! That's a big one. We could go with the tried-and-true Futurama method of dumping ice cubes into the water every year, but cubes are a choleric shape by nature, so their affinity for fire may reverse any good that they could potentially do. What this requires is some design thinking. Using metaphors. Let's say for a moment that the earth is like a bowl of soup, despite the fact that that's a simile, and I specifically called for a metaphor. The oceans are the soup, and the continents are the... edges of the bowl? The crackers that you crumble in? The third, funny thing that might be found in soup, thus completing this joke? Perhaps. And what do you do with soup when it's too hot? You blow on it! And why do you blow? Peer pressure! Because it never actually helps, but we all do it anyway, because we saw grown-ups do it when we were young.  Now, skirting right by the crude joke I just made, we can apply this to the earth by making... like... a giant machine that blows? Like a vacuum in reverse. Or one of those Dyson fans that doesn't chop the air, but rather propels a pleasant breeze by the will of the Heart of the Zephyr. That would be a pretty convenient truth, amirite?

Education. Honestly, I have too many actual ideas about education to come up with a suitably ridiculous one. And since I sincerely doubt that many school board members will end up reading this, there's not much reason to include actual ideas. So I guess I'll just have to think something up. Sledgehammer olympics. I'm not quite sure what that means, but I like the sound of it, and I'm sure your elementary school children will think the same, up until they begin participating.

Music. As we all know, music hit its peak when you, the reader, were a teenager. So how do we get back to the good ol' days of music? Just look for music that matches your tastes on Spotify or whatever. It's as simple as that. There is too damn much music out there for you to say that none of it is good. Just because you can't find something doesn't mean that it isn't there. The cops can pretend that the corpse of that drifter isn't out there somewhere out there, but they know, and I know that it is. In this metaphor, the corpse is the music, you're the police, and... the artist is me I mean the murderer. I dunno man, I'm just trying to get some running gags going, because my gags have been rather sluggish of late.

Wow, there sure are a lot of unrelated pics in this article.

Crime, war, ect. How about everyone stops being terrible? Like, for even just a couple days, every human being makes a conscious effort to not be awful to his fellow man. I'd say that I'm more familiar that most with just how terrible the dark side of humanity is, and it's not just because I'm an egotistical jackass. It's also because I literally cannot differentiate between real people and fictional characters. But anyway, consider this a decree, a mandate from on high. I hereby order the human race to just stop being despicable. Did you know that every person you meet, every person you see, every person you hear about, is a fully realized individual, with hopes and dreams, and secrets, and fears, just like you? You know how it sucks when someone is mean to you? Well that exact same thing happens to other people when you're mean to them, regardless of your justification. As the great Raymond Smuckels said "No one should be a cock to a stranger, ever." In fact, I believe this courtesy should be extended to those you know. Is that so terrible?

Oh. Oh dear. It seems that, in my state of fatigue, I've forgotten the first, most important rule of blogging: Give the people what they came for. And preachiness is not what my readers come here for. So I apologize. Without further ado...

THE BEST TIME TO WEAR A STRIPED SWEATER
IS ALL THE TIME
ONE WITH A COLLAR
TURTLENECK
THAT'S THE KIND
BECAUSE WHEN YOU'RE WEARING
That... special... striped... sweater...

There's no need for me to type anything. You're singing it in your head already.

A Few of my Favorite Things: Movies

I’ll be straight with you: I don’t care about movies. I am just not the kind of person who has opinions on them. If you’re lucky, this will keep this list delightfully brief. Then again, judging by my last post, I seem to have quite a knack for talking at length about nothing, so it might not be wise to read this if you have somewhere to be in a hurry. (The great thing about this statement is that no matter when I get around to finishing this draft, there’s a good chance that my last post had me talking at length about nothing.)

As you surely know, a movie is an objectively silly word that means “motion picture”, a phrase which is also rather silly. If you think about it, a motion picture sounds like how you would describe a film to a 3 year old. It’s a picture that moves. And calling them “movies” is every bit as silly as calling movies with sound “talkies”, which I think we can all agree is about as silly as the idea that there is some kind of empirical metric for silliness. Etymology aside, I should probably talk about the movies.

5. Breaking Dawn: Part 2

I already plumbed the depths of human disgust in my last list, so why am I doing it again? Well, fear not dear readers, for a reasonable explanation is at hand. You see, like any red-blooded citizen of the internet, I hate the twilight saga (their capitalization, not mine) with about as much of a burning passion as I can muster. I am proud to say that I have never watched this movie, and I do not intend to do so. I am including this film because its release means that Twilight is over. We staked it through the heart, decapitated it, burned its corpse, and found unsavory uses for the ashes. We are free from the shadowy pall that it draped over the public consciousness. We may once again feel safe in our knowledge that vampires are badass, blood-sucking creatures of the night, rather than golden-eyed, red-lipped morphs crafted from the quintessense of quivering schoolgirls by Stephanie Meyer, their blasphemous mistress. While it is true that her fell work has given a huge boost to the “Monster-love” genre, as long as we ignore it like the Star Wars expanded universe, we should be fine.

4. James Bond Skyfall

While it is technically true that I watched Skyfall, in that I paid to occupy a seat in a theater in which it was played, and remained relatively motionless (with respect to the screen) for the duration of it, I hardly remember it. I was supremely tired at the time, to the point where my most vivid memory of the experience was when my brother ate his ticket stub. On purpose. It dealt a death-blow to the theory that “James Bond” is merely a codename, and each new actor is actually a different agent (The movie, not my brother eating the ticket stub). This means that the “James Bond is a Time Lord” theory is once again the best explanation for the mire that is James Bond continuity. 

There was a gay villain, discussion of the effects of the internet and technology on the spy biz, and an explosion so huge that I suspect it must have been fueled by annihilation. I don’t recall the sky actually falling, but I do remember my friend saying “Skyfall!” rather loudly while Bond fell off of a bridge or something. It was definitely a “you had to be there” moment, but I thought it was so funny that I’d bring it up anyway. The next closest thing to the sky actually falling was the theme song by Adele, which everyone else liked, so I guess I might as well like. Despite this, I suspect that Chicken Little would be rather disappointed in this film, overall.

3. The Avengers

I may not be a comic geek, but I’m still a geek. And that was quite enough for me to enjoy The Avengers. It had just about everything a movie needs to be great, short of Oscar-baiting angst. And a clearly defined conflict, I suppose. The point is that The Avengers beautifully tied together the franchises that constituted it, with no one character hogging all the screen-time, and each character’s previous movies being acknowledged. (Did I mention how much I eat that shit up? Okay, that’s the last time I do that. I promise.) And while this happened, superheroes were beating the super out of each other, and then did the same to some aliens (maybe?). It was also perfectly witty, as we’ve come to expect from Joss Whedon, God-king of the internet. Praise him.

The Avengers is also surprisingly deep, discussing the nature of man, and his quest for power over other men, in a way that I found similar to George Orwell’s 1984. Then again, I also compared “Highschool of the Dead”, an anime with a character unironically nicknamed “Dr. Boobs”, to 1984, so perhaps I am to blame for that. As a completely unrelated note, I’m still angry that, despite the name, almost none of Highschool of the Dead took place in, or even around, a high school.

2. The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises claims the honor of being the only movie in 2012 that I saw in theaters twice. In fact, I think it may be the only movie I’ve ever watched twice in theaters, as of the writing of this list. So, why is it number 2 on the list, despite being the only one to receive such a lofty benchmark of quality? Well, it may be because I watched it again that it doesn’t take the top spot. It is a well-documented fact that this movie didn’t make much sense upon closer inspection. And, thanks to the second viewing, I made with the closer inspection. But I won’t talk about that. All the little flaws and plot holes of this movie are as chatted-about on the internet as they are forgotten by me, so I’ll focus on the good things. But before I do that, I should say that my primary complaint is that, for a Batman film, there wasn’t enough Batmanning. I realize that this was meant to be a Serious Film, discussing Serious Topics in ways that are Serious Business. But I paid to see a man dressed like a bat punch things, and it was disappointingly sparse in that respect.

So, now to focus on the good things… They were present? This movie had a story, and it was good. I enjoyed it. It also had plenty of quotable lines, which are things I treasure. Now, whenever I say, “Speak of the Devil, and He shall appear”, I do it with my hands in my collar, and my best Bane impression in my cords. Speaking of Bane, his voice was fun to listen to, like Morgan Freeman or Stephen Fry. Someone should make a GPS voice based on it. The movie also seemed to have a pretty good soundtrack, despite the fact that it seemed to be the same song playing in the background for three hours.

1. Wreck-it Ralph

As someone who cares far more about games than movies, it should come as little surprise that my favorite movie is one that is about games. As I’m sure you know, movies based on video games have a track record for being prodigiously terrible. I wish I could give an example, but I can’t think of one that isn’t terrible enough to be considered unmentionable. But Pixar avoided this curse by making up their own characters, and relegating recognizable stars to cameo roles.  When I went into the theatre, (spelled that way just to show spell-check that it’s not the boss of me) I kind of expected Wreck-it Ralph to just be a bunch of dumb video game references. In retrospect, this was tremendously stupid of me, as it’s made by Pixar, and Pixar makes some really great movies. This movie has the holy Triforce of things that appeal to me in movies: feels, references, and puns. It had deep characters, a great sense of humor, an interesting story, and an important moral (probably?). This movie had a minor character, who was a donut, named “Duncan”. If you are the intended audience of this blog, then that alone should be enough to convince you to see this movie, by hook or by crook.

Honestly, I would probably pay the price of admission just to watch 2 hours of the Nicelanders dancing. Any attempt by me to describe the way they move would be a terrible disservice. Their movement is a true masterwork of the art of animation, the way Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is to the medium of painting, or this blog is to the discipline of incomprehensibility.

 Conclusion:

There isn’t really much to conclude. I’ve watched a lot more movies in the last year than I did in years past, but I still haven’t really gotten used to forming opinions on them. 

Special Blogspot Notice: This time I might actually fix the picture problem, since the thrill of saying "hell" outside of church only lasts so long. But that's not a promise, that's a threat.

Actually, now that I've gone through the trouble to make these exuses, it's seeming likely that I'll never fix it. I hope you enjoy the tumblr loading animation.