still just a rat in a cage

This past weekend was a good one--may have been the best weekend of my post-graduation life. It was definitely the best non-holiday weekend.

On Friday night I went out and, as promised, drank myself stupid with Billy. I spent most of saturday laying in bed, sick as hell.

I met Amish, Kevin, and Billy out about eight o'clock on Saturday when I finally felt like my body could hold down some solid food.

Amazingly, I drank coke all night and still had a great time. You can have fun at a bar without consuming alcohol? Who knew?

But now the weekend is over and I'm back in my rat cage.

I feel like I've been caged for a while now. I've tried to spin it in my head like maybe I was a hermit. Like a tai chi hermit or something. But hermits usually live on mountains or in forests and don't have to take phone calls all day. Hermits also do not live with phychotic crack whores.

As soon as I can get some money together (probably meaning: when I decide to stop paying money back to the government) I am going to get the hell out of dodge. In a few weeks we're planning to visit Billy in Chicago (we're still planning to do that, right?), so I can get a feel for that place. Denver might also be an option.

I'd like to stay in Des Moines, but unless I can find a better job here in the next couple months I don't see the point. There are shitty temp jobs in major cities across the country. No reason why I should stay at this one.

Also, I read a Sci-fi novel called Matter recently. I think the author's name was Ian Banks. It was interesting, but maybe not 500+ pages interesting.

Your Tandy

Last night I set out in search of Cricket's old drawing featuring Andy's cursed eBay shirt but quickly gave up once the Attic Apartment wrapped me in its fiendish web of nostalgia. The only good thing that came out of it was an inspiration to take up Herodotus where I'd left the damn thing like four years ago, in the dust outside some city where the men had dressed as women and invited the enemy into their palace and then slit their throats when everyone was blind with Sauza and lust. I had snapped a bigass binder clip in as a bookmark and that fucker was still there hooray.

 

A while ago the school offered me double donuts to take over a Wednesday night comp II course that was so bad the teacher quit fifteen minutes into the seventh week. Really it wasn't so bad but I am electrified thinking of the thing ending in three days. Jep. Now I just need a final. I'm leaning toward the text-based adventure framework:

 

            YOU WALK INTO YOUR BEDROOM AND YOUR TANDY DISPLAYS A RESEARCH PAPER EXACTLY LIKE THE ONE YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO TURN IN FOUR WEEKS AGO. DO YOU PLAGIARIZE IT?

 

y / n / help what is plagiarism

 

YOU TURN IN THE PAPER BUT THE INSTRUCTOR NOTICES THE OBSCENE BIFURCATION OF YOUR LANGUAGE WHEN IT GOES FROM FEVERED GIBBERISH TO PROFOUND AND LYRICAL. ALSO, YOU SEE NOW YOU FORGOT TO CHANGE THE FONT AFTER COPY-PASTING.

 

write a new paper / back to google

 

In Minneapolis you could waltz into any corner Rainbow market and sniff out the bakery case and remove a plastic box of polar bars and fuck, those things were delicious. They were so good. I have searched the internet for a recipe and found nothing but imposters to the name and drawings of white bears sledding through the Arctic. Slap this food item on the list of things I would devour were I to return to the Midwest. It is far below the flying (fighting?) burrito, but still—it's there.

 

Archival Search Entry One

From 30 Nov. 2004:

This morning I woke up at four after having a horrible, horrible dream that someone’s attack dolphin almost got me. It popped out of this little hole in the yard, and had big ol fucking dolphin fangs. Its sonar blast was a warning. It really was pretty damn scary.
Then I woke up and thought for certain that the world had ended. But CNN.com told me that the only important news was something about fossils indicating an earlier presence of humans in N. America (?? who knows, it was 4 am) than previously thought. So after checking the closet and the shower for space invaders, dolphins, or both in one, I went back to bed. Which is to say, I went back to the pile of blankets and dirty clothes in the center of my living room.

This makes me miss my old apartment.

Test 2

Well, Sarah and I stayed up all night watching the fucking entirety of Venture Bros. Season Three. Was it worth it? I suppose. I tried to break away to type and to read but was so mentally throttled by two weeks of low-level craziness at my job that I slunk back to the couch to watch costumed people punch other costumed people. My only clear thought after the entire six hours was that life would be much, much better if I lived in an expansive compound instead of in a single long room above a garage in a neighborhood of red-tinged beer-gutted assholes and their creepy staring children forever standing in the center of Dingens Ave. or tootling around in their Power Wheels.

The Power Wheels kids are kind of cute, though.

Emailing this one in since I'm at work again this morning. (Red bulbs set above our desks spin to life if anyone accesses a webpage with the word 'blog' in the name.) I switch Saturday mornings with another employee here every six weeks, and this one is the worst so far. Last weekend the entire office was staffed by me and one other person, so it was all coffee, books, off-key singing under breath, phone calls, video game websites, posing the Gumby action figure next to the phone. Today though the entire damn campus is alive with employees and dead with students, so that nobody has anything to do but wander around and hector other people with bizarre favors (the librarian just came in asking if I had any plants smaller than the palm tree behind my desk).

Back to Venture Bros.: it was pretty good. I caught most of last season one episode at a time, and came away with a general impression of slight disappointment, but after watching the whole mess in a single go it coheres better than I last noticed. My criticism is that they totally should have pursued the Dr. Venture as supervillain storyline, instead of immediately shutting it down ten minutes in. Come on! Totally refreshing new direction here. I sound crazy.

Here are some other reviews:

Books

Bowl of Cherries: Pretty great.
Under the Volcano: Pretty wordy.
Best American Essays 08: Good essay on the Hitler 'stache

Dreams

The one last night about the gym: pretty fucked up.

Video Games

Resident Evil 5: pretty great, not as interesting as 4, but with good replayability in the mini-game
Left 4 Dead: Not as addictive as it was a week ago

Sarah and I are thinking about moving again but just can't decide. Right now the darts are in the map in SF and Mpls, but any change is probably a few months off.

<strong>Weighing in for Orlando</strong>
My job is impossibly cushy
The worst weather comes in the form of warm rain
The theme parks were actually pretty kickass for Halloween

<strong>Weighing in on the Get the Fuck Out side</strong>
Our friendly boozing Missourian and Sarah's pet Mormon both moved away
The best bookstore is the Borders in the bad part of town
I have not found a single bar I care to return to
This city's arts culture is really barely disguised yuppie culture
I could rent two apartment in DM for the cost of our current place

test, bitches

Test!

Top 10 Conspiracy Theories

From Above Top Secret

HURRAY!!!!

The other day Sarah asked me what my favorite video game of all time was. I was unable to give a definite answer but I can say that the original Punch Out is in the top 3.

Couldn't help but think of the blog

News headline that caught my eye. Yahoo started feeding me British content, thought the group would be amused. http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20090325/tuk-life-us-britain-names-fa6b408.html

Interesting advert

Find the interesting tidbit in this link http://dave.uktv.co.uk/
Looks like I need to be near a tv on Easter weekend. I'm sure they'll get to the web shortly after.

Travel

Thought I'd say hello. I'm fiddling around with various bits of software and waiting for WoW downloader to get the damned next patch pulled so I can shut it off.

I have some new advice to anyone thinking of traveling out of the country and not being independently wealthy. If you say you are doing touristy stuff but don't have a list of intended destinations you'll win extra scrutiny. That or the agent just felt like a game of "Screw with the American". Not going to elaborate on that till I'm back on my home connection though at the time they were vastly more interested in my paper than in my digital materials so they probably wouldn't notice. Running with the paranoia though just to be sure.

Going to see some sort of student produced show this evening, not sure what about yet. Hoping its not too painful as it sounds like its going to be longish. Also managed to get in to see Watchmen last Sunday. Got my host to go along and got a positive review from someone that had no previous knowledge of the story. No sniggering about nudity here which also had me wondering about differences in editing. They seem to be more relaxed about sex but harder on violence. This was really brought home when I was flipping channels and saw an animated program talking about sex ed of the female form and they were very thorough. So I did wonder if we saw a longer Archie sequence but less somewhere else as it didn't seem as long as they claimed.

That's about it for now from the UK, going to go back to fiddling with my potential webspace. Ta for now.

Doogie Houser

Oh man, if only the theme song was this cool when it was on tv.

Motherfucking Piss Shit Cock in the Asshole Fuck Whores

Six years wasted on developing, designing, and writing...

And somebody beat me to it.



PISS! Why?!

Dude's car got dinged up a bit, othewise it went fine.

Girl: So is this how you impress girls you bring home?
Dave: No, I have a box of dinosaurs in my closet, but you aren't ready for that...

Seriously though, this girl likes me. She doesn't, however, like my double bachelor bathroom or dilapidated bed. OTHERWISE, it's awwright.


How are you, internet?

This is the program you were looking for.

Sometimes I wonder, what if I changed my Facebook profile photo to some horrible, offensive pornographic image dug from the depths of the internet?

Borders here is selling all CDs for 50% and it is a bounty.

They are also selling DVDs but with Netflix I only scoff at them.

As you know if you're Kevin or Sarah or Wes, I have been playing the dick right out of Left 4 Dead, and I can only say, let's play it more!

I found this article pretty entertaining at work, even having never seen the commercial or being able to watch it at my desk.

Did you even know it existed?!

How to make Alan Moore cry

The End is Nigh!

Well my work place just started the voluntary layoffs. What's that you ask? You can willing be fired instead of quitting. What madness is this? It means I can have a week off, collect unemployment and still keep my job if things get bad enough that they've reached that point to save money. Which is better than just being fired which can still happen. I've seen guys who have been there eight and twelve years get canned over the past few weeks. If that does not scare the crap out of ya then you must be in the top 1% of rich people in this country that denounce there citizenship to skimp on taxes or you're in Obama's cabinet.

Not enjoyable in the least but there is still hope to retain some kind of employment even as we hit rough patches and I hope the rest of you office jockeys have some kind of security like this instead of just being cast out into the world. Perhaps that's why there are so many blockbusters coming out this year. A national distraction for a few hours at a time. Now if only movie theaters could get some bailout money so I don't have to take out a loan to buy popcorn and a small diet coke.

Star Trek trailer during Watchmen got me excited. Its other trailers gave off a stardate 90210 feel, but the action in this one drew me in. Now I want to know what the heck is going on and what kind of crazy twist did J.J. Abrams add. Lt. Uhura is so fucking hot.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

I do.

Midnight showing was worth it.

Visually awesome. And they did not pull any punches. Dr. Manhattan as he is seen in the graphic novel, so be warned.

Character portrayal was 99% straight from the page.

Story was unbelievably faithful to a point, except the end which I can understand the change and I'm satisfied with it. Some things did not make it in but the continuity of this story would be a nightmare for anybody and he still pulled it off. If you never read the graphic novel then you won't notice.

As a director he pulled it off.

Soundtrack was enjoyable and relevant to the film so it does not distract you from the visuals.

See it and make sure you go pee first and skip the soda because it's 2 hours and 45 plus minutes and your not going to want to miss any of it.

That's all I'll say for now. Oh there is more but go see it first. Then in about a week I'll bitch.

100 Years of Failure

Can anyone name the American policy that has been enacted for 100 years, costs taxpayers $1.6 billion per year and has never been proven effective?

Hint: It is also the root cause of 6,300 murders in Mexico last year.

Politicians might not see it, but just about anyone else with a moment’s thought will acknowledge that we don’t usually see that sort of rampant bloody murder associated with the trade in legal items—however good or bad for you they might be.

I'm either being really ballsey or really Palsey

Hoorah. 3rd week without internet. How did people survive?!

The dick-n-fart cartoon that I'm legally bound to is proceeding as planned. If I were being paid to do it, I wouldn't be shuffling my feet so much.

Also, I'm trying to get this Ichthyolophelia cartoon started after about 5 years of being on my procrastination list. However, shit keeps getting in the way.


Oh, and it's been in the 70s here in Denver. It is DIVINE.

?????

So as most of you probably know I work for a company who just happens to be one of the largest contributors to the current state of the union. Today I find out that I'm probably not going to get a raise......nobody in the company is. I'm already underpaid for the work I do, seriously I bust my ass everyday to save money for these people. I'm really at a crossroad here. Do I swallow my pride and say well at least I've got a job in this day and time or do I stand up for myself and tell these people to fuck off. They just bought a new corporate jet and I don't get a raise. Thanks to your gross misuse of company funds for years and years I don't get a raise? I don't know maybe I get them to pay for my college and get out. That's probably what I'll do hopefully in that time frame they don't break my spirit enough to keep me there the rest of my life.

The Cat Bong

"What the human mind doesn't invent, huh?"