The Million Word Year

One man. One blog. One year. One million words.

Archive for July 9th, 2010

Mood Ring : Distracting shinies

Jul 9

Posted by MegaWordMan in Journal | 2 Comments

Well, it’s arriving late, but my brain has finally snapped into Summer Mode, where my mood goes up but my attention span goes all to crap. I’ve had the hardest time finishing the last 500 words of the day’s blogging because my brain simply refuses to sit still or pay attention. I’m trying to finish up so I can relax for the day, and my brain is already out there romping on the grass and staring up at the blue of the sky.

I used to think that this was just a reaction to school ending for the summer. After all that mental restriction and regimentation, it would only be natural if, like a quarterhorse too long in harness, my brain needed to run free and wild and work out the kinks (so to speak) for a while.

But school days are long long past, and yet it still happens, so either my brain doesn’t know any better, or it’s just the natural effect of summer. Long days, lots of sunshine, fresh breezes… they bring out the kid in all of us, and no matter how old and serious and responsible we get, that inner child will always want to just wander out into the sunshine and spend all day doing nothing but pleasing ourselves.

Hard to imagine, isn’t it That’s what summer vacation was as a kid. Spend all day doing whatever you figured would be fun. Repeat. Amazing.

Well, enough of this thinking and making words. I’m going to go lie in a sunbeam and read, like any good little nerd would do. Seeya tomorrow folks!

OMGEEK : The Hitchiker’s Guide to Daleks

Jul 9

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

Sit back in your chair.

Take some deep, cleansing breaths.

If you have asthma, get your inhaler out now.

Because what I am about to link here is one of the most awesomely geeky things imaginable.

And I don’t want anyone getting hurt.

OK. Disclaimer over. The following is… I kid you not…. a Hitchhiker’s Guide entry, done in the style of the BBC television series, about Daleks.

I will not be held responsible for any damage done to you or your effects via fangasming.

It even has a green flashing THIS NEVER HAPPENS at the end. I’m so happy.

You know what would be an awesome insanely ambitious nearly impossible to do fan project? Do an entire actual encyclopedia in this style. It would be the most awesome tome ever. (Well, obviously, it would be a computer program not a book, but you know what I mean. )

Any subject you can think of, you just type it in, and up comes a wonderfully dry and snarkily objective entry on it. It would make learning so much fun! At least for us hardcore Adams fans/comedy geeks.

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Interesting : Russian + Cosplay + Photoshop

Jul 9

Posted by MegaWordMan in World | 2 Comments

First, click on this here link. Go ahead. SFW and everything.

Wild, huh? Those are some damn fugly people huh? And in some sad cosplay costumes too! LOL, right?

But just look at those “AFTER” shots. Then back at the “BEFORE”. Compare those two. Marvel at the difference. Say to yourself “Isn’t it amazing what you can do with Photoshop these days?”

Then open any random magazine to pretty much any random page. Look at that woman being used to sell something. See how pretty she is?

Imagine what she REALLY looks like.

And remember this lesson any time you feel bad ’cause you don’t look like the people in the magazines.

Nobody does. NOBODY.

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Music : Charlize Theron vs. Ninjas

Jul 9

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | No Comments

Oh, and some pretty boy sings an incredibly generic song too.

And now, a pause so all you over-enthused Charlize Theron fanboys can clean yourselves up.

Everyone all nice and tidy now? Remember, you don’t want to chafe!

First of all, how charming, their Meet Cute happens while she’s disemboweling a live human being. She’s so into his vulnerable, beat-up, pretty-boy-gone-bruised good looks that she almost forgets to impale the living viscera of a person with hopes and dreams and a family who’ll miss him, and does so WHILE SMILING AT HIM.

Aww, isn’t love grand?

And how come she has to rescue the same dude three times? Either she’s just really bad at rescuing (or bad at the keeping-rescued part, which is worse) or this is all just an elaborate sex thing for them to satisfy their burning hot hurt/comfort fetish, in which case her callous killing of ninjas is even the more horrible. They’re probably just day players hired to hold a sword.

Oh, and don’t feel bad if the song gets stuck in your head (I’m talking to you, Great White Snark, from whom I ganked this link) Part of the bland generic musical formula is to use known cheaply-effective brain-soothing techniques to make the song lodge in your brain whether you like it or not. Especially those gently-descending glittery echoing arpeggios. Those are brain candy. It doesn’t matter how cheesy and overused and generic and lame they are, your mind still goes, basically, “oooh, pretty!”.

Happens to all of us.

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Video : Insant 90′s nostalgia hit!

Jul 9

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | 3 Comments

OK, brace yourself, because watching this clip will INSTANTLY TRANSPORT YOU BACK TO 1996.

Wow, that brings back the memories. Memorizing ATDT codes (loser in the clip obviously does not know how to turn on SPEED DIALING, ha ha ha, newb!), logging on to bulletin boards, getting in trouble for making long distance phone calls because there’s no good BBS’s in your AREA CODE, playing “door” games, spending amazing amounts of time downloading a pirated game and knowing that if the slightest thing went wrong, you had to START ALL OVER AGAIN. No “resume download”. It crashed? Start over.

And this was stuff that took DAYS to download.

Collecting GIFs and sound clips…. no MP3s yet. Trying hard to find PORN. You young people have no idea how good you have it, with the pornucopia of the Internet in your pocket at all times.

Using GOPHER protocol sites, and using the web in text-only mode. Still completely blown away by how awesome the Internet was… and it was TINY back then. But going from the backwater bump on the ass of nowhere that was the modem-BBS world to the big city of the Internet was mindblowing.

Getting all excited every time some news program did a segment about this new “Internet” thing. Totally “OMG, we’ve been mentioned on telly!” And of course, also ruthlessly mocking the newspeople for their laughable ignorance.

“Now…. this “Internet”… in order to connect with it, you need a “modem”, and that plugs into your “phone line”, is that correct? And how soon after you “log on” can you be “surfing the web”?

Hot tip: Nobody cool ever called it “surfing the Web” more than once, and without irony.

And for some reason, being SUPER excited when the population on the Internet reached 15 million. Not at 1 million or 5 millions, or 500 million for that matter. For some reason, it was very definitely 15 million Internet users that was the exciting goal, as though if the Internet made it that far, it had officially arrived. Or something. I suppose it was, in its own way, like civic pride. Proud that our scrappy little community of nerds, nerd, nerds, and AOL users had finally made it to the big leagues.

And of course, there was backlash. People complaining about how the Internet was better when it was this cool secrets that you had to be somewhat of a nerd to even know about and use. This was back when USENET was the place to join the international conversation about damn near anything, and definitely on nerd-friendly subjects like politics, science fiction, programming, and PORN PORN PORN.

I sort of miss the days when I collected porn and sound clips semi-randomly. There’s the programs that will log into USENET groups and just download all the binaries, and I used to be a faithful user of one. It was fun. I’d let the program do its thing, and when I was done, I’d page through all the downloads, deleting most of them instantly, and filing the few I kept. Over time, you build up quite an eclectic but focused collection that way. And I was always, always, always looking for my space on my hard drive. The battle against wasted hard drive space was eternal, as the moment you were done poring over every single file on your system (thanks for the “View All” function, Xtree Pro!), and deleting anything you were no longer interested in, you always had way more hard drive space than whatever you wanted to install needed, and the urge to go find things to fill that HD space was overwhelming….

Nowadays, I almost never run out of HD space. I’ve got 80 gigs on this HD, and the only reason it’s even two thirds full is that there’s a bunch of raw video on there that I am too lazy to back up to DVD-R s and delete.

If it wasn’t for that… I doubt I’d have more than a third full. I blog, I play Flash games… it’s all in “the cloud” now. I still have a porn collection, of course (even if I became a eunuch, I couldn’t get rid of it… it and I have been through so much together, it’s like a member of the family!), and of course, I have TONS of mp3s and always want more. But I don’t collect full-length movies (or even clips, any more) and mp3s do not take up much space in a gigabtye world. And of course, image files stopped being a major factor a decade or more ago. So really, I have a lot more space than I can ever see needing.

Of course, I’ve said that many times before, but there’s always been something that came along that proved me wrong, some awesome new kind of file to fill up all that space.

“I can’t imagine using up all 20 megs of this!” “Here, see these IMAGE FILES? Aren’t they COOL?” “Damn!”
“Alright, now I got 40 megs! I’ll never fill up all of..” “Here’s Wing Commander. It’s 21 megs fully installed. ”
“OK, now I have a sweet ass 200 megs. That’s a fifth of a GIG. Now I know I will never… ” “What, you’ve never heard of mp3s and P2P networks before? DUDE. ANY SONG YOU WANT. Free. NOW. ” “Holy SHIT. And they are three to five megs each? Well, there goes the neighborhood. ”

It wasn’t until the 5 gig hard drive that I felt I was catching up. It took a lot of porn collecting and mp3 raiding on P3P, plus downloading a LOT of emulator ROMs and other games, to fill that up.

But fill it I did!

But still, I will gamely once more say : I can’t imagine ever filling this hard drive. Seriously. I can’t even begin to imagine what sort of file would be so awesome to have that I would download it and keep it on the HD in such quantity that it filled this sucker up. I’m not interested in bigass video files, so what’s next? Some amazing new 3D technology that is completely immersive but a small room takes up 50 gig? What? :P

And if anything, the computer world is moving in the opposite direction, away from local storage and having everything be in “the cloud” somewhere. High networks speeds have made this possible, something I predicted would happen and people wouldn’t believe me. HAH. Vindicated!

Then again, every time I’ve been proven wrong in my declaration of the impossibility of filling my hard drive space, it’s led to an awesome new computer thing that totally rocked, so… I guess I could live with that, too. I mean the last one was mp3s and I couldn’t live without those. I am a music JUNKIE and I need my TUNES. I have almost 4,000 mp3s and I still get bored with my collection sometimes. I still find myself flipping through the directory tree going “I’m bored of all of this!”.

It’s a habit.

So whatever’s next, big old computer world : BRING IT ON.

Still, sometimes I miss those days when everything was bright and new and exciting, and the USENET wasn’t drowned in spam, and neither was email, and people left their FTP sites unlocked and opened every email attachment with the anticipation of a child at Xmas, and never thought twice about it, and people were kinder, and more polite, and had respect for their elders, and…

…fuck. I’m officially old now, aren’t I?

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Journal : I hate my bed

Jul 9

Posted by MegaWordMan in Journal | No Comments

Well, it’s that time of the year again. The heat is stripping my brain of thoughts, I practically have to stick a firehose in my mouth to stay hydrated, and I hate my bed.

This happens every summer. It takes just a few bad nights of sweaty, fevered sleep and I start hating my bed and getting the urge to sleep anywhere else. I drove a former roommate crazy because he’d keep going to bed with me in my room and wake up with me sleep on the living room couch, one of the chairs, curled up on a blanket in a corner, whatever.

I was sleeping, basically, like a toddler. I thought of faking having a sleepwalking problem but I decided that was too much work.

Eventually, I learned to deal with it a little better, but still, I figure the only way to stop it completely would be to live in a hotel where I could get fresh linens whenever I wanted them, and if things got really bad, I could move to an entirely different room with a totally different bed.

And by the time I ran out of rooms, the summer would be over and I’d be sane again for a year or so.

I figure it must have something to do with pheromones. In the summer, I sweat so much that the level of “me” scent gets high enough to activate some primitive “don’t sleep there!” primate instinct that makes me have dark and fetid visions of burning the accursed bed in some massive primal ritual of purification via the cleansing power of the flame.

More realistically, I have some clean sheets to put on the bed, so there’s that. Problem is, it’s a king-sized bed wedged into one corner of the room, so changing the sheets on it is a serious pain in the ass.

Mostly likely, I’ll end up just putting the sheet on by the Lazy Half-Ass Slacker Method, which is where you spread te blanket out on the middle of you bed but don’t bother tucking it in any where.

It doesn’t work very well, and you can easily end up shifting the sheet in your sleep and end up waking up on bare mattress, but at least it’s less work.

And really, avoiding effort is what life is all about, right? The perfect life would be completely effortless.

I’m working on it.

LOL : The Most Immature Song Ever

Jul 9

Posted by MegaWordMan in Links, Video | 2 Comments

I feel shame that I am posting it. But I swear, something inside me compels me to share this with you. I am pretty sure it is my inner five year old boy who is giving me a viscious titty twister till I do, and who despite my decades of sophisticed comedy appreciation and steady deep refinement of my understanding and appreciation of the art, the science, and the JOY of comedy, still finds this song incredibly funny.

I hereby present to you… the Willy Bum Bum song. Warning, it’s extremely NSFW.

In fact, it’s NSFDNA. (Not Safe For Damn Near Anywhere. )

I’d like to think I have some sort of reasonable, adult-sounding justification for enjoying the piece. It’s not so much the subject matter as the gleeful abandon with which is is pursued, I think, that makes it go directly past your censors, past your inner adult, past even your inner teenager straight to the little naughty child in all of us who likes saying naughty things just for the fun of it.

Bum bum willy willy bum bum! Tee hee hee.

I don’t get quite the thrill from that sort of things that others might, because my parents never put a lot of restrictions on what we kids could and could not say. They tried, valiantly, to keep us from swearing, but they couldn’t stop doing it themselves, and being the fair-minded parents they were, they figured that you can’t go enforcing a rule that you can’t yourself follow, so we could pretty much say whatever the fuck we wanted, at least in terms of swearing.

I’m pretty sure that if a relative had been over and I’d shouted “Satan demands your earwax!”, I probably still would have gotten in trouble.

But still, transgressing the rules of society is the next best thing to defying your parents “omnipotent” will (I did something naughty and nothing bad happened to me… I AM GOD NOW. ” )

I’ve often thought that you could make a million dollars by recording a comedy album that is nothing but amazing volumes of high density colorful inventive swearing. The 14 year old boys of the world would love it. It would be their number one thing ever, instantly.

But it would have to be inventive and colorful. Even the target audience would get bored if you were just sitting there going “Um, fuck, shit, piss, cunt, um….. booger… uh…. ” for 72 minutes. (Although honestly, that could be pretty funny too, for a little while. Use a really whiny, wimpy voice. )

Or maybe a reverse swear jar. A little Flash app that, instead of being a jar you put your coins into after YOU swear, is a jar you put your coins into (via Paypal) then IT swears. Plug on some really good vehement soulful expressive swears so people get something really cathartic for their quarters.

Who knows, might be a big hit.

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