Oh joy!

For those of you who couldn't make it out to the lecture, you can still sort of watch the slides and hear me & Patrick & Mike talk!

So fine, we didn't rent an expensive camera, nor could we be bothered (yet!) to integrate the slides into the video presentation. Nor could we afford wireless mics. But! The lecture is still there! For viewing!

And shit, if you want a fancy presentation so bad, why don't you give us the money to do it!

Sorry, a little defensive. I didn't care too much about the recording when we were getting everything set up, but now I'm kind of thrilled to have the documentation there to review. It's the first time I'm getting to see it from that side of the audience! So many things to change and improve!

Including - hey - a real budget to record the thing and make a slick video presentation out of it.

Anyway, listen to me blathering on. Watch the video! Part 2 after the jump!

On my way home last night I was listening to this story, part of the New Yorker's fiction podcast, and was so engrossed I missed my stop. It was worth it, I only missed it by one and so I walked down 5th avenue to Union Square from 23rd street, listening to this wonderful story. A beautiful March 8th that felt like early fall, almost too warm for a jacket.

Please, check it out. You can listen to it right in your browser, download an MP3, or get the podcast through iTunes.

I haven't read any Tobias Wolff before, but I'll be picking up his story collection that includes this one.

Write in the comments and let me know what you thought.

in full recovery
canvas and acrylic
9"x12"
all inquiries sbruckert@gmail.com

Join us as we take a brief and completely unscientific survey of the residents of New York City about which big names of science matter most to them!

i am sorry for everything i have ever done
canvas and acrylic
4"x4"
all inquiries sbruckert@gmail.com

comets 1
canvas and acrylic
4"x4"
all inquiries sbruckert@gmail.com

Dear God,

I don't really actually believe in you, for reasons (and with qualifications) too numerous to outline here. Then I'd really be missing the point of this.

Anyway, it's like this. I'm stuck. I feel dumb. I know the economy has a lot to do with it, but I feel like all of the long hours for low and no pay I've put in over the last several years have all amounted to nothing. I can't get work in my field, or any field, it seems like, right now. I know I could probably get a crappy minimum wage job, but I couldn't even cover my expenses at minimum wage in this outrageously overpriced city, so forget that. I don't know how other people do it. I mean, I do know. Living in dangerous neighborhoods 8 or more to a two bedroom apartment.

Which brings me to one of my great moments of pause in this whole interior monologue. Things could be a lot worse. Things could be a lot worse for me just in this country's standard of living... And in other countries? Well. I could be living in a wood shack with only three walls, a tin roof, dirt floor, within smelling range of my town's al fresco toilet, which is really just a big hole in the ground half-full of dung and urine.

Which then makes me think that I actually have it pretty damn excellent, and I think statistically that's true. Which makes me sound like a spoiled brat when I say

But I thought it would be better than this. I thought adult life would have something *more*. I've worked really hard for a long time to become the person I am today, socially, intellectually, creatively, and I'm in a place where I think my best-case scenario is that I'm still just paying my dues. Worst case scenario is that regardless of whatever personal or creative or intellectual progress I myself make I will never financially make it in the city and I will have to declare bankruptcy and move in with my father and cry myself to sleep every night about what a horrible, wretched failure I am because somehow despite what I have accomplished and what I am capable of I am unable to support myself because the skill set I have developed, which are the same skills I have a natural aptitude for, have no significant financial value.

So, God, I guess this is where you come in. I wish someone could just tell me what to do. I wish there was a Department of Winning in the city where I could go and I could go see a Winning counselor and she would say "Okay, fill out these forms, bring them back here, and we'll tell you exactly what to do for the next four years and by that time you'll have a great career and be debt-free."

I would do that. At least I think so. I am pretty ornery and have a hard time following directions. But I'd like the opportunity to blindly follow someone else's correct plan for my life for a while. I've been doing what I want and what makes sense to me for a long time, working pretty hard at it, too, and it hasn't really worked out for me. I mean, in some senses, it really really has. I have everything that I want out of life.

Which then makes me think: Well boo-fucking-hoo. Hard knocks life for you.

I do, I have everything I want out of life except *money*. I've been living paycheck to paycheck pretty much since I moved here. I've had a few ups and downs, but I've been just barely squeaking by for years now. And I'd like to get a little bit ahead. I don't want to constantly be panicking at the end of every month just before everything magically comes together for me.

Again, boo-frigging-hoo.

I don't know. I think a lot of my frustration comes from jealousy. I see so many people in this city, even people I know, who are mostly in the same boat I am... struggling towards some sort of success, a solid work ethic, seeking validation for their work, and maintaining a good amount of progress and momentum. The difference is that if they fall, if they can't make rent or their electric bills, there is a safety net below... a place that will allow them to get back up, dust themselves off, and climb back up to the trapeze.

Last week I was working with this world famous avant garde artist and I asked him over lunch, "How long did it take? At what point in your career were you able to totally focus on your work because you had become successful enough to really support yourself without worrying too much? What did you change to get to that place of financial security."

And he gave a mirthless little laugh and said, "Well, I've really made no secret of it. When my father died he told me 'You won't be rich but you won't starve.' And that's basically it. My work has never been profitable. I lose money on everything I do. My father left me enough money when he died so that I can do that."

Which, you know, was not encouraging.

On the bright side, I'm not interested in being avant garde. I'm interesting in connecting with a broad, mainstream audience. That's an important part of my work and what I'm interested in. I just wish I didn't have to live in fear, every single month, of not being able to pay my rent, my electric, my gas, my grocery, my internet... Every month. I'm almost 30. What did I do wrong? And how do I fix it?

Dear God, is that where you come in for most people? To give them purpose? To give them specific directions about what to do and why?

Though I've heard that God is a lousy financial advisor, that he's more about purpose and direction and meaning and happiness and joy and all that. Which I've got, actually. I'm really just short on the financial thing.

I need a benefactor.

Anyone?

Yes We Can Grant The Telcos Immunity From Prosecution For Their Compliance With Illegal Wiretapping

Yup, the wiretap bill just passed - the one granting the feds continued access to warrantless wiretapping and giving immunity to companies who violated the rights of their customers during the first illegal round of warrantless wiretapping.

And Barack Obama voted for it!

Listen in on all your phone calls? Read your e-mails?

Yes we can, yes we can...

Meaning that all of the artistic slop I yearn for from my building and neighborhood spewed forth in a phatasmagoric gusher from the anus of ye olde bushwick in a geyser of sweetness and delight.

My friends! The artists known collectively as the Stumblebum Brass Band played their hearts out across the rooftops and, eventually, through the barroom of Kings County, making my night complete, whole, and without flaws.

What this evening of debauchery and wonder will mean for my morning and the ensuing post-intoxication headaches has yet to be determined. But for now... For now! My spirit is fulfilled and my mind reels at the garden of earthly delights afforded to me by my low-income household.

Please enjoy the Stumblebum music I have linked to herewith.

Perhaps you might enjoy the wicked and distorted times with me in the weekend days to come!

some good dialogue
lots of wince-inducing crap
end: we both said "meh"

UPDATE: David Remnick, Editor-In-Chief of the New Yorker has written me a brief e-mail in response to the video:

Unless you're a superdelegate. Their vote is worth about 10,000 of ours.

Anyone remember the good old days when having your vote only be worth 3/5ths of a "real" vote seemed like a raw deal?

Democracy: Don't call it magic! It's an illuuuuuuuuuusion.

You may not know this about me, but I love photo booth pictures. If I'm somewhere with a photo booth (the real film kind, not that inkjet bullshit) and I don't get my picture taken, it's because I don't have any singles or because the booth is in a bar and I get really drunk and forget to have my picture taken (this is what happened to me last night).

Anyway, I've started a new flickr Set for photo booth pictures. I will be posting updates as they happen, and I would encourage you all to post your own photo booth pictures because they are great.

Yes.

I've just scanned in 32 pictures from the wedding Karen and I had in California in 2005.

There are many more wedding photos, but these were the black and white film photographs that Karen's good friend, Brianna Walsh took.

Check out my favorites after the jump.

Behold the haircut Eric had between 1991 and 2005, when Eric found a group of very nice people that love him very much.

It's a movie!

First post for a new segment I like to call Suggested by Smolinski:
Rumor has it that when you slow down Mr. Goldblum by about 30% he sounds drunk.
True? You decide.

In order to do everything I want to do for my work-in-progress, I've been teaching myself motion.

Here is a quick little experiment I cooked up today.

It was reported at 8:53pm on March 27th that Dylan will not be attending the poker game on March 28th.

Sources close to Dylan claim that he is "totally pussing out" and "really just very scared about losing his vest."

The judges were not available for comment, but there is some risk that the judges will declare Dylan's absence a forfeiture and award Sam the best vest.

And Michelle.

Speaking of technology making our lives better, check out this video of a dog playing with himself...

Okay, so this is a boingboing repost, which makes me feel like a tool, but 2 Girls 1 Cup didn't make me scream like this. Too good/horrifying not to share.

I got halfway through when my screams of "Oh no!" got so loud the neighbors came over to find out what was happening.

Then we all watched the rest together.

(Text copied from my Yelp.com review of the venue. Sorry for dishing up refries. I'm sleepy. Pictures tomorrow!)

The sound was pretty bad but the visual experience was downright exploitative.

Let me explain.

You can see the stage from pretty much anywhere on the first floor.

The 2nd and 3rd floors? Not so much.

There is a wrap-around balcony which has great views if you are the first, second, or third closest person to the railing. But because the stage is below you, and so you must look down to see it, anyone behind that third person needs x-ray vision to see the stage.

There are risers on one side of the balcony, but on the night I went that area was VIP only. The rest of the 2nd and 3rd floors (which make up quite a bit of square footage, probably 20-40% of the non-bathroom floor space attendees are allowed to stand in, and thus the space counted towards their capacity limit), are given over to bar/lounge areas with stools at the bar and couches against the walls.

None of the bar/lounge areas have any lines of sight to the stage.

If you want to see the stage you *MUST* be on the balcony railings or the 1st floor. The other 20-40% of the venue has NO LINE OF SIGHT to the stage. Meaning that once the first floor has filled up for normal capacity and the balconies have been stuffed, there are still 20-40% of ticketholders for a sold out show that need to crush in as much as possible on the 1st floor. After that, everyone else in attendance cannot see the stage.

Except on one of the many HD screens scattered throughout the venue.

Which, you know, would be nice, except for a big problem: If I wanted to watch a band on an HD screen, I would've stayed home and rented a concert video. But if I'm at Terminal 5, it means that I've paid upwards of $30 after ticketmaster fees, plus traveled all the way to midtown and just shy of the Hudson river to see a live band play. Live. Not on a television.

I've lived here for five years and seen shows in venues from Queens to the Financial District, and I've been to shows in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, and Connecticut for ten years before that, and this is the single worst venue I have ever attended. I will not be going back.

I wouldn't go here to see the Beatles resurrect John Lennon and George Harrison to play one last set. I'd wait for the DVD to come out, since in the end I'll probably just be watching the show on a monitor anyway.

And I hope the guitarist's strap breaks, as it did here:

soaked with sweat in March
going again tomorrow
to scream myself deaf

thanks to forklift for the pic

Well, after Sam's post about Spore the other day, I did some investigating to find out if Spore is coming to Mac, my platform of choice these days.

The answer is yes. And no. Mostly no.

Allow me to explain.

According to this EA press release, "Spore for the Mac will be made possible through TransGaming's Cider Portability Engine, with experience gained from the past EA Mac titles."

Without getting too technical, Cider is basically a Windows emulator. "Portability Engine" is code for "Software we use so that we don't actually have to port the game to another platform."

And what all THAT is code for is that Mac users get a third-rate product: Third-rate compatibility, third-rate performance, and if their track record with "past EA Mac titles" is any indication, third-rate support.

The performance issue is one of my biggest pet peeves, and will probably stop me from buying the mac version. Basically, the game will need all the memory, graphics, and CPU power the PC version does, PLUS all the resources needed to run Cider, the 'emulator'.

This means that on a Mac and PC with exactly the same specifications, the game will run much slower on the Mac, just because EA didn't feel like the Mac audience was worth the time and effort to make a real port, but is happy to take Mac user's money just the same.

The third-rate support problem really seals the deal for me. If I get this game, I'm getting the PC version and playing it in boot camp. See, when EA put out Battlefield 2142 for the Mac, they did it on Cider.

The first nasty surprise I got is that it ran about the same on my brand new mac and my four year old PC.

The second nasty surprise I got is when EA released a major patch for 2142 for the PC... and then waited a month to release the patch for the Macs... *EVEN THOUGH THE MACS WERE RUNNING THE EXACT SAME PROGRAM AS THE PCs, ONLY THROUGH CIDER*. So it wound up that all the PCs, and most of the install base, were on the new version... and so none of the Mac people could play on any of the updated servers. For a month.

(And, actually, they're charging more for a worse product. At the time of this writing the PC version is $19.99. The Mac version is twice that. Oh! And I almost forgot. The expansion, Northern Strike, which is required to unlock all the weapons, is not available for Mac and there are no plans to bring out a Mac version - even though it's just a map pack.)

I eventually complained enough that EA gave me a refund... But the fact remains that Cider ports of PC games are phoned-in half-assed products that don't work nearly as well as fully ported software that runs natively on your OS. So when EA says they're releasing Spore using Cider "with experience gained from the past EA Mac titles," don't believe them! As long as they're still using Cider, they haven't gained enough experience.

Once a year we get some of the wealthiest, overexposed people in the entire world into one room so they can spend 4+ glorious hours patting each other on the back so hard it's a wonder they don't come out of there black and blue.

Every movie release is a celebration of how great and fantastic all of these people are! Do we really need an annual recap?

I'm cranky!

Also: still sick.

Also: Did you know that Diablo Cody, writer of Juno, was at the Oscars this year? Did you know that she was discovered on her blog?! Why don't those talent scouts ever come knocking on my door?

... And why don't I have anything good for them to read?

Oh, hell.

Though apparently this thing is going around. Nearly everyone I've talked to has had what I have or knows someone who had it. Even my mom, way back in Massachusetts, says that half her office has come down with the same symptoms (and similar duration).

And just a couple weeks ago, I had food poisoning that knocked me out for half a week. I've been joking that Mercury must be in retrograde.

Turns out that it is.

Anyway, for the brief moments I'm coherent and conscious, I've been watching classic Trek on CBS.com. They don't have every episode, but they have a lot of them. For free! Also: Twilight Zone!

While looking for some hilarious Shatner stuff to show Karen, I stumbled across something really magnificent: William Shatner singing Common People by Pulp.

I can't wait until I'm not sick anymore!

I have a sore throat, some aches and pains. I have been eating healthy food, vitamins, and downing lots and lots of liquids. I have a big job that starts tomorrow at 6pm, so I hope I'll feel better by then.

How come I get sick so often?!

Anyway, here is someone else's comic about my public school experience.

Carlee had her going away party this past Friday night at her apartment on Moore St., a place she shared with Bailey, Liz, Carlos, and maybe some other people(?). The population of the apartment expands and contracts (they've had other roommates, Patrick lived there for a spell), but I'm pretty sure those four are the main residents. It was good, there was a big turnout and the apartment was packed with howling bodies by 1:00am. I smoked myself hoarse and drank half a six pack of Yuengling, and left around the time a screaming crowd had formed in a circle surrounding a makeshift flipcup table, warped plywood placed atop an ancient card table with folding legs. The wood was dark with spilled beer and Bailey's booted feet stomped in frothy amber puddles on the floor.

Dylan and Michelle are back from their nearly yearlong curious expedition, and it is good to have them back. It's hard for me to articulate what it is they bring to a room, but I hadn't realized how much I missed it until it was finally back. They have been apartment hunting and have settled on an apartment in Greenpoint. They came over for ice cream and a chat the other day, and I asked them about the more personal aspects of their trip as their blog is more academic than anecdotal. I'll let them share details here if they choose to.

In other news, I have quit smoking as of today, February 17th, 2008. I am done smoking for keeps. (Except, perhaps, the occasional hookah with my neighbors. It would be rude not to!) Whenever one of my friends quit, I always say "Real smokers never quit, they just stop for a while." I am determined to prove that I was never a real smoker!

I guess I'll leave it there for now. I think my writing is coming out a little funny today. I'm reading a story in the new issue of A Public Space all about an expedition to the North Pole that is ruined and devestated by rats. I think the narrator's voice is sneaking in to my prose a little bit.

A side note: Albanian pride today in Manhattan! Woo! (Full disclosure: I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Albanian party.)

My sister got Karen a cool sweater for Christmas. Here is a picture.

For the past two weeks or so, the site has been in various levels of down-ness. I hope the main site has been accessible and readable to the outside world, but posts haven't really been possible and comments were probably b0rked too. I tried to move the site to another server, but the MT scripts consistantly maxed out the CPU load on their servers and I don't have the balls, know-how, or time to debug it.

So we went back to our old hosts, IX, and had them bring us up to the latest versions of php and mysql and stuff, but it was a hassle to get the DB back up for reasons too boring to get in to here.

Anyway, with any luck the site is back for real for a while and I'll start my post-a-day regimen up again.

I miss everyone! I hope we talk soon.

Well, I thought I was going to post a bunch of stuff today but I didn't. I ended up working all day!

Today I was working on subtitles for Oscar award nominated short films. This was not exciting or creative work. What I spent the day doing was the information-age equivalent of coal mining: data entry.

But! I had a good day, I made money, and I'm happy to be gainfully employed. I'm not complaining, just trying to give you the flavor of my day.

Then we had game night when I got home! My friend Josh came and joined myself, Karen, Patrick, Paul, Carlee, Geoff, and Jess for some rounds of Fluxx, Mafia, contract bridge and Carcassonne.

I am finally learning contract bridge! After everyone left I still wanted to play so bad that I went a few rounds with Autobridge, which was fun and instructive. I'm very excited about playing more in the future. It's tricky to get it going for the first time, because there are so many concepts that are new to me, but now that I've gotten through the basic introduction, I'm beginning to learn and understand all of the advanced material that I've been given by my grandmother. Who, coincidentally, voted for Obama today in Illinois!

Anyway, I don't have much else to say right now. I'm trying to find some places to play contract bridge online but MSN's contract bridge is down for February and other places that require a software download also require windows, so now I'm looking in to java stuff...

I've got work in the morning tomorrow but after that I'm free so I should be posting fun stuff for real later in the day tomorrow.

Thanks for listening!

But I feel like I still owe three entries from those days.

And I will deliver them! Tomorrow.

Tonight's entry is a cop-out entry. But I have lots of photographs from over the weekend, plus an exciting new video! You shall see. You will be glad that you waited.

I don't know, but I'm hoping that that's plenty will be the #1 search result for that question.

Seriously. The guy totally sucks. He's a horrible comedian. I have no idea why he's famous.

In other news: the food poisoning is slowly going away. I've just stopped wearing diapers, but solid food is still a bit of a trick.

Stay tuned!

Have you ever considered doing the master cleanse, but didn't have the time to go through with drinking nothing but spicy lemonade for a week?

Try food poisoning! Enjoy the same amount of expulsion overnight!

Yes, some of our readers were there last night at the ol' Bruckert-Lanyi homestead when I expressed intestinal discomfort and wrapped up the evening of Settlers of Catan by throwing up into a bucket in front of some of my closest friends.

I had assumed, at the time, that I was going to feel gross for a while longer but that the danger had basically passed. Boy was I wrong.

Over the course of the night I had uncontrollable completely liquid diarrhea (imagine the sound of a woman peeing) and heavy, forceful vomiting that eventually turned in to dry heaving with little gasps of stomach acid when I ran out of things to throw up.

I had probably 15 minutes of this once an hour, ever hour, from 10pm to my last session at 8am this morning.

By the end of it I had even determined a strategy for rehydrating: when my body warned me that it was time, I'd run to the bathroom, sit down on the throne and hold the bucket in my lap. Do move the vomit stage along, I'd drink a glass or two of water until I started throwing up and then eventually finished up with a good two or three dry heaves. After that, and hopping in the shower to rinse of the tortured, tormented ass I had long since given up on wiping.

But! Here was the trick: After that, I'd be good for another hour. So after the vomiting was over, I'd drink *another* glass or two of water so that I would absorb whatever I could in the hour between that session and the next.

I felt so smart! Eventually I even felt pretty okay, even in the bathroom, because I was able to get rehydrated.

The good news: I think I'm losing weight!

After tens of hours of enthusiastic preparation in Rock Band, Karen had her first real drum lesson today.

And I am commemorating the occasion with the first ever LOLkaren.

Bring on more LOLkarens!

My latest editing project is a little bit... gay.

I'm doing a 20 minute documentary piece about the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (henceforth known as GLAD) with director Seth Bernstein! Right now I'm digitizing footage, always the least exciting part of the job, but the rest of the work is going to be really fascinating.

We're going to be covering 5 cases from GLAD's archives, starting with the Boston Public Library case. From a draft of 30th Anniversary materials...

In 1978, a sting operation targeting gay men took place in the Boston Public Library, resulting not only in the entrapment and arrest of 103 men, but also in an energetic response by the gay community, and the creation of Gay & Lesbian Advocated & Defenders (GLAD).

We're going to be using what happened there as a base to bring us through some of GLAD's biggest cases (and, thus, a partial history of gay civil rights in America) all the way to today's struggle over the right to marriage and all the fun and excitement of seperate (but equal!) civil unions.

I got permission to post clips, so you'll see some of the people who actually lived the stories talk about their experiences.

Anyway, back to work!

I kept my Team Fortress to an hour today. The rest of the time I spent cleaning the house, helping the neighbor out with an A/V installation, playing chess with the neighbor, cooking Karen dinner or cleaning the apartment.

I seem to be making progress.

Maybe I'll be a fully functional adult by the time I'm sixty.

I have a meeting in the afternoon tomorrow. I'm starting on an exciting new project. It should be great. I'll write more about it later.

I'm going to stop the post here. I know I'm kind of phoning it in again tonight, but I'm tired and I want to get up early tomorrow so I can have a nice full day.

Have a good Monday, everyone!

Went out to a party tonight with some friends. It seems like something that should be so rich with detail, the G train, bodegas, an ex-fire station loft apartment building, an incredible view of the Manhattan skyline, but I just rest my chin on my hand and try to think of what to say about it.

I'm getting older. When I was 18 years old I could drink half a litre of hard alcohol over the course of a night and be chipper and perky the next day. Last night I had three beers with Eric and woke up with a screaming headache after sleeping in to 1 in the afternoon. And the morning after taste of all those cigarettes... like I had been licking dried pigeon shit the night before. I went to the party tonight and had five smokes and drank a liter bottle of water.

I never cared about doing all the things that were bad for me. I always seemed to be really invincible, even a real terrorfest of illicit consumption left me bright as a daisy the next day, but now just a few drinks will ruin my day. Now I'm much more cautious about drinking and smoking, because I really feel every little puff and sip.

I don't really mourn the loss of my intemperance, but I've never been very social in large groups and I've found that when people say "party," they mean "an informal gathering during which the primary activities are smoking, drinking, dancing, and sometimes talking (depending on how loud the music is)".

I had a good time. I'm glad I went, I don't want anyone to misunderstand. But at times I felt as though I were a bodybuilder at a tupperware party.

Also: I'm getting too good at Team Fortress 2. I think I have to cut back. Plus, the loading screen between maps shows you how many hours you've played as each of the nine classes. It makes me cringe every time, counting all those hours up as the next map loads...

15 hours medic...

19 hours engineer...

It's a very depressing loading screen. It reminds me of the summer I was 19 years old, and as I was packing up my Playstation to bring back to college, I went in to clear out the save game files from my memory cards, and all those wasted hours were staring me in the face. Like:

Final Fantasy VIII, 72.5 hours

Metal Gear Solid, 23 hours

Crash Bandicoot 3, 16 hours

And all I can think is: "God, there are a lot of things I'd rather have done with all that time. I'd have a novel, or at least a few good short stories. Now all I've got is character data I'm about to erase."

That put me off video games quite a bit for a good long while but, clearly, I've still got some work to do.

I take some solace in the fact that I'm here, writing, now.

Good night!

From the unpublished archives:

Last night the White House Radio TV-Correspondents Dinner was off the hook.

I've been doing the blog-a-day thing for less than a week and I've already fudged it up. I missed yesterday!

Well, today I'm going to post twice. But one of them will be a cop-out post.

Guess which one!

Spoiler alert! (highlight the text below if you are ok w/ spoilers)
Boring for anyone not in my immediate family.

He has been for a while. I mean that more in the fatalistic long-term kind of way, the way we're all dying, except not. I mean, he's had some serious problems and, at times, it seems as though he's going to be checking out at any moment. He calls to tell me how much he cost the insurance company that month, and rattles off maladies and treatments I can barely pronounce, never mind identify or explain. His identical twin brother - his genetic match - checked out almost two years ago, but the ol' dads is still ticking away. So when I say he's dying, he really is. But at the same time we have no idea (12 days? 10 years?) when he's really gonna fall asleep for keeps.

I wanted to shoot an interview with him, but not until we were sitting on my couch bullshitting, and it was already too late to get a camera before he went back home.

I want to get this killer interview of him, something so spectacular and complete that it can be some kind of weak proxy of him, so when I miss him I can watch and listen, he can fill me in on everything I forgot or never thought to ask. But that's the catch. There will never be anything more than what I capture on tape, and I have to ask all the questions myself. There are things about my father that I'll never know or understand, and the thing that drives me crazy about it is that it is impossible for me to know what to ask him to get at the things I don't know I'm missing.

I wasn't able to get a movie camera together while he was here so instead we went outside and I took some pictures of him. This is the best one.

The Daily Show has fallen to pieces. I must admit I'm coming from not an entirely educated standpoint: I haven't been watching it since the first three or so sans-writers episodes aired. But I didn't laugh. I was even kind of bored. I mean, I love The Daily Show. I used to watch it every day it was on. It's, really, more important now than ever because of all the campaigning stuff that's happening. But without writers, the show really feels like... well, like no one's writing it.

Here comes The Soup to the rescue. The E! writers aren't unionized, so the show must go on! The Soup is an E! Show hosted by one Joel McHale, who recaps the week in television through clips and snarky commentary. The mood of the show is basically that Joel & crew all have jobs at E! but they hate all the dumb shit on television. It vacillates between gleeful mockery and pained annoyance that the writers have to watch all this stuff to make the show every week.

The clips you can see on youtube and on their site are pretty great, but if you really want the full experience you should buy them through the iTunes store. You can get the current and next 7 episodes (they air weekly on Friday nights) for $5.99, a super deal considering that archive shows cost $1.99 a piece and you can't get them for free on bittorrent because nobody uploads them. Not current episodes, anyway. Sad!

They come with DRM, so I can't play through them with VLC which burns my ass, but whatever. At least I don't have to watch the commercials.

P.S. I totally support the writers strike, as sad as I may be that The Daily Show suffers so horribly because of it.

Does anyone out there know CSS?

I've been doing video editing for so long that my technical skills are really sub-par at this point. It has taken me all day to get the site up and stable. Right now what we have for the site is a built-in template called "New York" or something like that. Of course, I want to get our pictures up at the header, and it'd be nice if it could be an image map so that you would go to an author archive when you click on a picture.

But I have no idea how to do that, and I've spent the last hour banging my head against a wall of CSS. I managed to get a white background in front of the old That's Plenty banner, but it looked so bad and didn't offer any clickability (like to get back to the main page) that I've just gone back to the default css.

Now I know why people hire people like me to do their computer work. I know if I bought a CSS book I could figure it all out and get it looking exactly how I want it, but my time is limited and there are about 500 things I'd rather do than learn CSS.

*sigh*

Anyway. Come! Celebrate! The grand re-opening of That's Plenty! Watch your step, I haven't covered up the manholes yet...

So, the site looks a little weird. I know. And some stuff might not work. I'm sorry about that.

But we're now running on Movable Type 4! Which is very exciting. But we're still getting frequent 500 errors, so I may be shifting the hosting to another company. I thought the update would fix that problem but, alas, it didn't.

Please excuse our dust and enjoy...

JAPANESE BUG FIGHTS!!!!

The site is in a state of crisis. Nothing, of course, compared to the global environmental crisis, the crisis in Iraq (or lots of other countries where things are even worse for the general population on a day-to-day basis), the current American leadership crisis, etc. But insofar as That's Plenty can have a crisis, it is as bad as things can get.

A few years ago, when Ryan was visiting he suggested that we start a blog. I thought it was a great idea, but was unsure that he and I could provide sufficient content to make the site interesting or worthwhile, so I invited a bunch of people that we went to school with to be writers. Dylan and Michelle moved on to another project that requires most of their time, so I invited my sister and Missi St. Pierre to join the staff. Julie Lou and Wythe wanted to be a part of the site, so I asked them on too.

The contributors who make the site run are all some of the most intelligent, funny, interesting people I know. There is a feeling of mutual respect and admiration among everyone who posts here. So why is it that, lately, no one is posting?

ninety minute ride
stuck inside a paint mixer
cost: eleven bucks

why movies aren't
shot handheld by amateurs:
it sucks to look at

unlikable cast
annoying dumb dialog
piece of shit movie

My wife and I didn’t get each other anything for Christmas.

Our philosophy is that we try to make every day special, nullifying the need for extra effort on holidays like Christmas or Valentine’s Day, when the average yahoos of America have to run around compensating for the last three months of ignoring their spouses or taking them for granted. We have pretty high standards for marital conduct and communication, so we don’t have to make up for bad behavior with trinkets and doodads.

Plus we’re so broke that we’ve been eating rice almost exclusively for the last three or four weeks. A production that wrapped in November still owes us almost $800, but I don’t want to talk about it.

We’ve told our parents and family members that we aren’t getting anyone anything for Christmas and that we’d like them to reciprocate, and when objections are raised we inform our parents and family members that we’ve spent the last several months throwing away or ebaying most of the consumer garbage that has accumulated like plaque on every flat surface of our tiny apartment, including the floor, and that we’re quite happy with our now-manageable collection of stuff and that any gifts will promptly wind up either in the garbage or on ebay so they’d really be better off saving their money and just giving us a phone call on Christmas instead, which is all we really want anyway.

My father, the contrarian I inherited my difficult personality from, sent me $170.

My mother, the perfect mother, really, in terms of regularly sending me things I need badly but never think about like towels, new shirts, comforters, etc., sent me a jacket that I immediately wanted to return to prove the point I had made about sending gifts, but once I realized that the Kenneth Cole peacoat she picked out is lighter, warmer, and a better fit than the 30lb wearable workout I’ve been lugging around since last Christmas that is down to just one button, which I am only able to fasten by lightly ripping the stitches on each wearing just enough to wrap the fabric all the way around my ever-expanding bulk, I decided to let her make a liar out of me and kept the damn thing.

Here is a portrait of Karen that I took tonight: I wasn't sure if I should acknowledge the fact that I haven't really written here since August, or if I should just keep writing as though I had never been away.

So, I know it's been forever since my last post.

Months, literally. I know.

And I'm going to post something real.

Soon. I promise.

For now, please watch this video.

This video gave me chills. It's amazing. Thoughts?

Today I read an article about the Jhannet Sejas/ Regal Cinemas case that was published on August 2nd. It's kind of crazy. The story in a nutshell: a girl recorded a 20 second clip of the new Transformers movie on her camera to show her little brother, and is now facing up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. I have signed on to the boycott against Regal Cinemas unless they drop all charges.

Anyway, I noticed a statistic in the story that drives me batshit crazy every time I read it: The worldwide motion picture industry lost $18 billion in 2005 as a result of piracy.

It's a very fishy statistic. For starters, that oft-quoted statistic encompasses the losses of "the worldwide motion picture industry, including foreign and domestic producers, distributors, theaters, video stores and pay-per-view operators."

According to the MPAA's own document, "the major motion picture studios represented by the MPAA" only lost $6.1 billion to piracy in 2005, a more accurate number since we're talking about a major motion picture shown in a nationwide theatre chain. But as for the US, it breaks down even further. Even the MPAA claims that US losses add up to only $1.3 billion, an even more appropriate number, as the crime was committed in the US and US law applies.

But I think that number may still be way too high. The MPAA calculates these losses not on any scientific study or research. They cite their source for these numbers only as this:
Piracy loss calculations are based on the number of legitimate movies – movie tickets and legitimate DVDs – consumers would have purchased if pirated versions were not available.

How can they calculate this number? Well, they can't. It's barely possible to count the number of people who have downloaded any given movie from a pirate site, and even then there are almost always multiple copies of the same movie available, and the numbers of downloaders shift from minute to minute.

Even still, let's say hypothetically you could count every illegal download and every illegal hard copy DVD sold. (You can't and they haven't.) It's quite a leap to go from that number to assume that each illegal download and sale is a loss for the companies. Not everyone that downloaded any given movie would have paid to see the film in question if a pirated version was available.

The essence of what I'm saying is this: the $18 billion figure so often quoted in the press is dreadfully misleading and wholly inaccurate - not because of bad science or lousy research, but because it is entirely made up.

Most people have heard about the Michael Vick dog fighting thing, but not everyone I've talked to about it has seen this video of Michael Vick's teammate talking about how dogfighting is totally okay.

Gold!

She is from Russia, but speaks perfect english because she moved here 11 years ago.

This is an open call for new contributors to That's Plenty!

Due to a few lapsed memberships and two of our fiercest bloggers turning in to a splinter group that hates America, we're now looking for one or two more people to join the team and keep the blog going.

We're looking at all age ranges, all topics. We're most interested in getting people on board that have a wide range of interests, and someone looking to blog their creative process would be a plus.

Please send a writing sample to sbruckert |nospam| gmail.com.

Thanks!

Sure enough. Available where fine .torrent files are DL'ed.

Not sure which one to download? Have your favorite torrent site sort by date uploaded.

The LA Times quotes Lisa Holton, president of trade publishing and book fairs at Scholastic, as saying they plan to

"...take down all this different material, and by taking it down we'll never know whether any of it was real until you read it yourself on Saturday morning."

Brilliant! She's right: just give them a couple minutes, and they'll have all the illicit copies down off the internet. After all, stopping the spread of information on a global computer network is a breeze. Right, MPAA?

Best of luck mashing all that toothpaste back into the tube, Lisa! Let me know how it works out.

Link to NY Times Blurb.

Apple's iPhone could emerge as the most overrated and misunderstood product of the 21st century - and the overwhelming majority of American's couldn't give even a quarter of a shit, new research suggests.

Lightspeed Research surveyed 39,000 people on its U.S. online panel in the days following the launch of the device on June 29-- and the research findings are staggering.

Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed who do not currently own an iPhone stated that they can't be bothered to drop that kind of cash, with 16 percent unwilling to sign up for two years of anything with AT&T, for fear their calling logs will be delivered without question to the NSA and 44 percent can't imagine why they would spend $600 for a device that actually does less than their current phone.

Respondents ages 45 and over care the least about Apple's new device. Sixty percent of respondents ages 18 to 24 said they are never going to buy an iPhone, followed closely by 25 to 34 year olds (64 percent) and 35 to 44 year olds (67 percent).

Despite the most aggressive hyping of recent memory, nearly 10 percent of respondents have never heard of the device.

Lightspeed Research claims those who live in the Pacific region were less than half as likely as those who live in other regions to ignore the iPhone. The New England and Mid-Atlantic regions also showed below average indifference levels.

In an additional survey of 34,000 respondents conducted by Lightspeed Research on 5 July, nearly half of those who won't buy an iPhone stated that having music, movie, internet and wireless all in one has already been done better for less money.

Straight outta the Distric' of Columbia, I've recieved a lovely little piece of mail art from one Lady Ay See.

It has been years since I've had this kind of exchange, mostly because I had dropped the ball on several long-term mail art pen pals.

It feels really, really good to be doing it again. And with such a talented partner!

Check it out here.

Even more exciting, I think, is the little speaker button next to the word.

Click the speaker to hear the dictionary say 'crunk' in a dictionary voice!

Worth a watch. I think you should judge for yourself, but there is one moment that made my blood run cold: our President wearing a gentle smirk while talking about mass graves and mutilation in the first couple minutes.

Anyway, it's not often you see someone directly challenge and question the man without a lot of cuts. Like I said, worth a watch.

We're almost there. The next step is to not mention her at all.

Hotlinking images is rude. It uses up my bandwith, and is just generally bad form.

I've told Dylan and Michelle this about 100,000 times, but they always say the same thing.

"We're laaaazy. We don't want to go to the trouble of downloading and uploading."

Well, the trouble with hotlinking is that you're giving someone else space on your website. Like one gentleman who saw the lovely post Karen did about finger moustache tattoos and decided to make his own post about it on his own blog.

Which has, as a result given me a 'back door' into his website.

Care to see what I can fit throuh his back door?

(And in case he fixes my little h@xz0r, terrible, terrible screen cap of his new blog post, courtesy of me, after the jump.)

So last night after I made the last post I was kept up thinking about the war in Iraq, the death toll, the sanctity of life, and the right to have an abortion.

Our President talks a great deal about how abortion and stem cell research are very bad things that should be outlawed in the country, and avoids talking about his faith-based rationalizations by citing 'The Sanctity of Life.' He even declared January 19 "National Sanctity of Human Life Day."

He might be able to sway my opinion if he worked hard to get a better, more comprehensive welfare system in America. Universal healh care in America would go a long way in convincing me that his feelings about human life were genuine. Certainly, making college free for all students above a certain GPA would help, too.

But, clearly, Bush's feelings about abortion and stem cell research have very little to do with the sanctity of human life. Because human life extends beyond the birth canal, but George doesn't care about those other years that come after a child is born. He believes that every life is precious and sacred, except the mother's if it is endangered by the fetus, right up until the moment it emerges from the vagina or c-section. Then you better pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Like he did.

But the continuing war in Iraq is a much more powerful example of how human life really doesn't matter all that much to our president, and that the continuing focus on September 11th from politicians of all stripes is a gross distraction from the real source of terror in the world.

Right after September 11th, I remember seeing news reports on the war in Afghanistan. The images were haunting by omission. When the twin towers were hit, you could see footage and photographs of people flying through the sky from the buildings, people covered in soot, families crying, and all the carnage and destruction in the pit of ground zero. But when we started attacking Afghanistan (and, later, Iraq) we got underexposed green footage of rocket trails sailing through the sky and a lot of maps with arrows on them.

What happened on September 11th was terrible, really awful, but that horrible day has stretched on for years in Iraq, and the suffering over there is barely even hinted at in the bulk of coverage.

Not for the faint of heart, Salon.com has some terrible images that bring the reality of war to the ongoing story of our neverending 'war against terror'. Or 'global fight against islamic extremism.'

I forget which one we're doing this month.

(Edit: These pictures were taken in 2004 & 2005.)

Link

he is self-obsessed
not even likably so
a total snooze fest

In the early half of the decade, my close friend Adam quietly released an album of cover tunes entitled Adam's Greatest Hits. After the critical acclaim that album received, there was no more output from this modern genius.

Until today. Last night Adam passed me his latest release, a cover of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive.

Please, enjoy.

Dear Madam,

I tip my hat to you. I offer my congratulations: you have mastered the pelvic thrust.

Now, however, it is time to learn new dance moves. There is quite a bit you can do with your legs, torso, arms, hands, and head. You have your entire body to work with. It is time to move on from the pelvis and explore the dancing opportunities available elsewhere in your body.

Love,

Stephen

I've been a Nine Inch Nails fan for a very long time, but I've never heard his stance on the state of music and the music industry. Well, now I have, and it's comforting to know that he thinks the record company people are greedy, shortisighted bunglers. Or, as he says

That's ... why you don't see any label people here, 'cos I said 'F--- you people. Stay out of my f---ing show. If you wanna come, pay the ticket like anyone else. F--- you guys". They're thieves. I don't blame people for stealing music if this is the kind of s--- that they pull off.

Read the whole thing here.

I didn't blog it when the 80s track list came out, because honestly I could give a quarter of a shit about Guitar Hero 80s edition. Sorry.

But the GH3 tracks that were revealed today? Boy howdy, I can't wait to school all you motherfuckers on these tunes:
Paint It Black - The Rolling Stones

Barracuda - Heart

(from ign.com)

Just... Record, go back to the beginning, record another layer, repeat.

Please submit some!!!! sbruckert (nospam) gmail.com

So it has come to my attention that maybe people haven't seen LOLcats. LOLcats, according to wikipedia, are

"photos of cats with humorous captions... a type of image macro, and are thus also referred to as cat macros"

Whenever I need to be happy, I go to the best source for all things LOLcats (and LOLrus, for the bucket enthusiast in you), which is a website named for a popular LOLcat caption, i can has cheez burger?.

Nothing makes me laugh this hard. Ever.

The Blow
(Fun fact - their URL contains the phrase "blow us")
talent show grade stuff
except I paid to see this
it's like youtube live

Electrelane

a really good show
precision ferocity
with ecstatic peace

Crowd Surfer

crowd surf in ninety-four
but here in the oh seven
land on your dumb ass

So... This showed up on my myspace tonight. What would a feminist ringtone sound like? Would you really want quotes from The Feminine Mystique screaming out of your pocket every time Gr00nd rings you up for a beer?

This is Ryan's:

In what can only be considered a staggering defeat for the wretched media virus known as DRM, the code necessary to decrypt every HD-DVD currently on the market has blown up all over the internet.

Posts containing the code were censored by digg.com and removed from their pages in compliance with DMCA requests, but righteous nerd outrage broke out and overwhelmed digg.com with posts about the code faster than the employees and moderators could take them down. In the end, the people won out and the founder of digg has gone on record as saying that they "... won’t delete stories or comments... and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."

Which is pretty ballsy considering they could get sued into nonexistence.

Whatever the fate of digg.com, the game is over for the code and (for now) HD-DVD encryption. The purveyors of software designed to lock legitimate users out of their own purchased content have heard the market speak: DRM sucks ass and nobody wants it.

As of 1:01am May 3rd, 2007, there were about 359,000 pages with the character string on the internet, according to google.

And now, 359,001! Ding!

So Amazon has been spamming me, asking me to write reviews of products that I've purchased from them.

The thing is, if I write a review for them they own my words. Plus I've added value to their site. For free. They want me to work for free.

If you do post content or submit material ... you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media.

Yikes.

So I turned it in to a fun writing exercise with various degrees of success.

Last night in Manhattan, Crazy Old Man (and author) Kurt Vonnegut died in Manhattan.

I have been reading Vonnegut since high school, when I was required to read Slaughterhouse-Five. He has remained one of my top five favorite authors. He was a prolific writer, as a trip to any bookstore's "V" shelf will attest, and through it all his work was insightful, entertaining, and deeply human.

Except for Timequake, which was a bit of a reprint and rehash of older material. And, you know, plus A Man Without a Country, which was written when he had clearly lost either his marbles or respect for his readers because it consists almost entirely of reprints - verbatim - from the aforementioned Timequake.

Still, he was a fantastic writer and I will miss him.

Thanks, Mr. Vonnegut.

From A Man Without a Country

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Times obituary here.

Vonnegut slideshow at nytimes.com.

His largely incoherent and curmudgeon-tastic second-to-last TV appearance (on the daily show) after the jump. Video courtesy onegoodmove.

I have no idea who started it, but newly started blog Elbow of Justice is totally biting on our style, and fully cops to it.

From their link to our site:

Another bunch of Ex-Bennington students... we totally ripped off their idea for this blog.

We're so fucking elite that people have started to imitate us.

Wait'll they find out how much we've made in ad revenue this year.

As mentioned below, there is some talk circulating around the interwebs regarding a blogger code of conduct co-authored by Jimmy Wales and Tim O'Reilly.

I got started on this little tirade after reading a quote from Mr. O'Reilly in the New York Times:

Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. “That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,” he said. “Free speech is enhanced by civility.”

This sounds like some crazy Orwellian shit to me. 'Censorship enhances free speech' requires the kind of logical jump necessary to believe that ignorance is strength. I asked him, via his blog, to make further comment on it. If I get a further comment, I'll post it here.

Some on Tim's blog have suggested that the code of conduct should be adopted because "Do you know how many people are afraid to post or comment fearing the vitriol. [sic] Their voices are not heard."

Anyone who doesn't speak because they're afraid they'll be contradicted - or worse, insulted - has no place in a conversation.

Only individual blog owners have any business regulating civility.

I've already made it my policy to delete (or edit) comments that I find annoying or spammy. (LIAM!)

Those who agree with this code of conduct don't need it, and those who need it won't adopt it. It's a pointless conversation, a pointless exercise. A conversation starter, and a weak one at that for precisely the same reasons that the code of conduct is worthless.

The only possible application for the above code of conduct is so that a blog owner challenged on their decision to censor their readers can cite a source instead of (gasp) using their own words to convey the strength of their convictions.

And, I say again, people who won't speak because they're scared of someone disagreeing with them, even abusively and inappropriately, doesn't really have a place in a serious conversation.

We should thank our lucky stars we only have to worry about idiots photoshopping our heads into gross or disturbing pictures, unlike so many in the world who actually have something real to be concerned about should they exercise their right to free speech.

And, as Dylan often says, Americans tend to be awful, really just terrible, at risk assessment.

There is a serious dereliction of sense involved in the fear of internet death threats. Does anyone have statistics for the number of people murdered last year over something they wrote on the internet?

How about car accidents?

If we're going to start really acting on our fears, let's do it with some sense.

Kathy Sierra, you can start going to speaking engagements again, but I reckon you'd better walk to them.

Oh boy.

So today the New York Times reported on a new blogger code of ethics written by Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales. They constructed the code of ethics partially in response to death threats sent to Kathy Sierra by the usual lineup of angry, overweight internet yahoos that shoot their mouths off and go to wild dialectic lengths including, but not limited to, saying things like 'shitcock.'

Never mind that this sort of rude behavior is not new (or news.) What makes it news is that this poor widdle baybee got a boo-boo on the parts of her brain that worry about aforementioned internet yahoos chopping her to bits.

I guess she didn't consider how easy it would be to outrun the kind of lumbering, 400lb man-strosity that has the time or desire to pick fights on the interweb. And that's if, and only if, the bearded land whale in question had the energy to get out of his computer chair or if his mom would let him borrow the money to fly out to wherever Ms. Sierra was.

From her blog:
"I have cancelled all speaking engagements.

I am afraid to leave my yard.

I will never feel the same. I will never be the same. "

She got so scared that the bad, mean internet man was going to commit murder in response to some blog entries she wrote that she actually cancelled all her public speaking appearances, demonstrating both a wild overestimation of the value of her life to even the craziest of internerds and a lack of understanding of the internet so staggering as to disqualify her from blogging permanently.

Which, apparently, kind of works out for her:
"I do not want to be part of a culture--the Blogosphere--where this is considered acceptable."

Unfortunately for Ms. Sierra, acting and talking like an idiot isn't exclusive to the internet or the parts of it often referred to as 'the Blogosphere'. So she might have a long way to run until she finally feels safe. Somewhere in northern Canada on a Safe Haven For Feelings commune, perhaps?

Anyway, I don't condone abusive speech or photoshopping (apparently there were some internet classics she posted on her site, but they're gone now), but I absolutely believe in the right to scream 'shitcock' in a crowded intertube.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Department of Homeland Security has made it safe to wear your VR headsets and mirrorshades again.

From their faq:

What is the National Cyber Alert System?
...
The National Cyber Alert System provides valuable cyber security information in the form of Technical Cyber Security Alerts, Cyber Security Alerts, Cyber Security Tips, and Cyber Security Bulletins. You can subscribe to receive any or all of the documents through email.

They've got Cyber Security Tips in a variety of Cyber Flavors such as Dealing With Cyberbullies, Cybersecurity for Electronic Devices (I couldn't find their page on Cybersecurity for Mechanical Devices - sorry!), even a page for Cyber Security Alerts.

This is really Cyberexciting for Cyberme. (That is, my Cyberrepresentation on the Cybernet, or my 'avatar.')

I'll see you- safe and sound- on the full motion video multimedia virtual reality information superhighway!

If you're anything like me, you hate our president. But you can sympathize with the ol' Dubya on one subject.

It is so hard to tell all them ay-rabs apart! Sunni? Shia? What's the difference!?

The New York Times has come to the rescue through their online edition on this conundrum and many other brain-burning toughies.

If you're not sure about the meaning of a word, or need more information about a topic, just double click on the word in the story! A new window will pop up (so as not to browse you away from the article you're reading) giving you that extra brain boost you need to understand just exactly why all those crazy guys overseas can't stop killing each other long enough to get a functional government in place.

(For the curious, Sunni Arabs believe that succession from Muhammad is not necessarily based on heredity, while the Shia believe that succession of Islamic leaders should descend from Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad.)

Glad that's cleared up. No wonder they want to kill each other so bad! That's quite an important issue!

(Tested on Firefox 2.0.0.3 and Safari 2.0.4. Works on Firefox, doesn't on Safari.)

In a press release today, the World Health Organization has stated that there is strong evidence from three randomized controlled trials undertaken in Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa that male circumcision reduces the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by approximately 60%.

This is suprising news, but my biggest question is how the trials were conducted. Did they take a bunch of guys, give half of them circumcisions, and then had them all have heterosexual intercourse with an HIV infected woman? How long did they wait to test them?

And if they didn't do that, if the process was somehow more ethical, how can they be sure they have accurate data about the impact of circumcision on the probability of AIDS infection?

Check out the press release here.

So if you're not sure if you can hack it, bail out now before you start rolling your eyes and calling me to let me know how it ruined your day that my first post in ages was such a ball scratching timewaster.

In the interest of mass appeal, I give you dry ice bombs. This is a DIY kit for harmless destruction of plastic bullshit and your precious eardrums : water, dry ice, a soda bottle.

On to the main event...

There are still nerdy Foxtrot strips on my Mom's fridge from my youth.

Notice the hose-and-sink contraption 3rd window from the left.

The other day, a regular employer asked me my IQ. I didn't know. My parents never had me tested, and I never contested the decision. I think their rationale was that an IQ test was an essentially useless metric that had no real bearing on my potential for success in life. Which is kind of what I think.

But since Simon asked me, I've been wondering. So, out of curiosity, I went to a couple online sites to get tested. I scored 141 and 139 at http://www.iqtest.com/ and http://www.iq-testing-online.com/ respectively.

I want to take the Stanford-Binet test, but I can't find a place to take it online or any place in the city that offers a paid sit-down test. I could buy a testing kit, which would allow me to take the test myself and administer the test to people, but that would cost me $1000.

Which I don't want to pay. I nearly didn't pay the $6 required for the second IQ test's results.

The scores I got were about what I expected. Over the course of my life, people have often estimated my IQ in the 'high 130s to mid 140s'.

After taking the test and confirming their suspicions, I don't feel any different. It's about what I expected, plus it's kind of arbitrary. It doesn't measure my ambitions, effort, or amiability, which are all important factors in personal success.

But now I know.

For all their whining and complaining, and despite profits being up, the entertainment industry may ultimately be responsible for its own demise.

So I'm going to ruin a surprise. About a month and a half ago, I posted about something stupid I had won in a raffle. I had said that anyone who sent me their mailing address would receive some stupid material. Well, the stupid thing I won in a raffle was a set of American Politics Quotable Notables Notecards. It contained two each of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Hillary Clinton. Also included was a set of stickers for each pair of cards. Examples include, for the Bill Clinton card, a cigar sticker and one that says "Good luck on your INTERNSHIP!" (Internship takes up as much space as the entire rest of the text and is in bright blue.)

Dick Cheney's got a pink triangle sticker, and one that says "Just a pretzel away from the presidency!"

Haw!

After writing little notes for the two people who sent me their addresses, I decided to write one to the company, "The Unemployed Philosophers Guild", which is based right here in Brooklyn.

The letter spans three of their ridiculous, stupid cards.

We'll see if they write back. Full text after the jump.

Plus, apparently, a bit of a sissy. I got a 70 on their little test. Ordinarily I don't post shit like this - even if it's just for fun and done by the kids. But this one has a great pictoral test and an introduction starring a true man among men, Mr. Bruce Campbell.

So what if it's just advertising for old spice. I had fun, dammit. What did you score?

The blog is back to normal. Better than normal! We have a new WYSIWYG editor for entry creation, I suggest you check it out!

If you don't like it, you can switch back to old-style editing at the bottom of the form by switching from WYSIWYG to Convert Line Breaks.

Enjoy the new That's Plenty!

And a special thank you to David Phillips at movable type who helped me find my ass, a feat which I could not perform even with the aid of both hands and an electric torch device.

I've gotten my pantleg tugged on several times by pretty much everyone on here for a new banner. Which is fair; I've had sole possesion of all the pictures we took together at that party at Josh's house for a new banner.

But no more!

I am releasing them into the wild internet.

So I say to you now: You want a new banner?

MAKE ONE.

Huzzah! We have successfully upgraded Movable Type on the blog... as well as the delightfully bot-blocking Comment Challenge plugin by Jay Allen.

So... this means no more spam! EVER!

I hope.

Anyway, I tested it and I've been watching the comments and sure enough the spam is disappearing into the junk folder where it should have been all along.

Rejoice!

Now I just have to fix this entry page bug...

As part of the continuing struggle against SPAM (we've been hit by increasingly larger waves as we stick around), I will be upgrading Movable Type (our blog engine) and making a few other changes.

There may be a little turbulence. I appreciate your cooperation.

The story so far:
Stephen: Hello!
Stephen: So, I encountered something strange this evening.
Stephen: I tried to go to a website, www.serials.ws
Valeria K: Hello, let me know how can I help you?
Stephen: and I recieved a message saying that the website could not be found
Stephen: not my ordinary browser message, but an earthlink page that told me the site couldn' be found
Stephen: I entered the same URL into a proxy website, like anonymizer
Stephen: and the webpage loaded fine
Stephen: responded to search queries, etc.
Stephen: So, clearly, the page is live and on the internet but earthlink will not let me access it.
Stephen: Which means that the page is 'censored' or blocked from me by earthlink
Valeria K: Please give me a moment while I go through the issue.
Stephen: I'd like to know if I can get taken off this filtering, and if I can't, I'd like to know what web pages are blocked/censored by earthlink.

My cell phone is crippled and unusable in so many ways it's hard to count them. Even the camera, one of the main features of the phone, is nigh unusable. The camera interface is easy enough, but it's such a pain in the ass to get the pictures off the phone that it's not even worth it to bother. You can send the pictures to a Verizon website, then after finding the website (the URL changed a couple times in the time I've had my phone, plus it's not easy to find even if you're on Verizon Wireless' page) you have to enter a username and password, different from your regular verizon account, and then eventually you can right click and save the thing to your computer. Only recently did I discover that I could use SMS to e-mail the pictures to myself, which is an undocumented method. And still a bit of a pain.

This is what it's like for a lot of the technology in my life. Commercial-level technology that is effectively broken due to poor design or the selfish dependency on undersupported proprietary technology.

I bought my Apple laptop so that I could do editing and sound work from home. Now it's my primary computer for everything, doing everything I ask quickly and flawlessly.

The short and simple reason I love my Mac so much more than I love my PC is this: I spend more time doing stuff and less time constructing hacks and workarounds.

As of last week, my PC spits out error after error when I perform tasks as simple as *opening folders on my desktop.* I'm not some computer n00b, haplessly banging away on a keyboard, either. I'm a lifelong veteran of these electronic disasters, and my first tour of duty was on DOS 3.0.

But now. Now! Here comes the iPhone.

Check out features after the jump...

Tickets to the FIVE Arcade Fire shows in New York City at Judson Memorial Church went on sale this morning at 9:00am in an online-only sale. The tickets sold out in minutes, but Miss Lanyi and I were lucky enough to grab a pair. Many people, however, were not so fortunate and you can find them ranting and whining over in BrooklynVegan comments section.

An ebay sale started, strangely enough, the night BEFORE the tickets went on sale and ending shortly after the tickets were sold out, closed out this morning at over $2,000 for a pair of tickets.

Another pair of tickets has just recently gone up for sale on ebay. The bidding started at one penny for the pair and, at the time of this writing, has risen to $255 in just 40 minutes.

While it is tempting to sell my own tickets for a king's ransom, I am reluctant because the tickets are will-call only *and* non-transferable. I'm aware that in normal will-call situations you could simply go up to the ticket window with your two buyers, show your ID and credit card, and then hand the tickets off to your buyers. But if the tickets are non-transferable, can you still do that? I think I may just hold on to my tickets to avoid risking the fallout of a botched sale.

Anyway, with all these angry scenesters having now failed to get tickets, this may be an ebay auction to watch. It ends tomorrow. How fast will the music fans out-money each other to buy the tickets they may not even be able to purchase? See you tomorrow!

** UPDATE ** Bowery Presents has updated their website with a newsflash about tickets and scalpers.

*ALL 5 ARCADE FIRE SHOWS ARE SOLD OUT*
TICKETS ARE NON-TRANSFERABLE. The ticket purchaser must enter
the venue. Copies of ID, Credit Card or Confirmation email
WILL NOT be accepted for entry. Only complete parties will be
admitted. No exceptions. Please DO NOT buy tickets on eBay,
Craig's List, etc. YOU WILL NOT BE ADMITTED!

So much for getting two thousand dollars just for being lucky on the internet.

In a message dated 1/3/07 9:50:30 PM, xxxxxxxxx@somebigcosmeticscompany.com writes:

Can we use more pc language for the talent... Caucasian, african american etc.... Don't want to create more work but it will be an oficial document for somebigcosmeticscompany and distributed around.
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Hello! My name is Stephen Bruckert.

I have been building your casting website and I just got a note re: political correctness on the casting website.

While I recognize that you may be pursuing alternate language for the website simply to avoid offending anyone who may see it, your request is somewhat problematic.

None of the dark-skinned women on the website are African-American. They have dark skin and features that we, as Americans, may identify as African-American or 'black', but none of the women are from America. Model 1 is half-Moroccan and has a Moroccan passport and may therefore be considered fully African. Model 2 has African ancestors but is a French citizen. Model 3 self-identifies as being from Martinique (an island in the Caribbean Sea which is a part of France and the European Union) and Egypt.

None of them are from America making them, by definition, not African-American. Two of the women are African-French (French-African?) and one is African.

So, ironically, in adopting language designed to return a full sense of identity to marginalized groups, you have actually robbed these women of their correct and actual identities.

Unless, of course, in the context of the advertisements, the women are 'playing' Americans, in which case your nomenclature would be acceptable.

If I actually hit the 'send' button on this e-mail, I'll probably get fired, so I'll just post it to my blog instead.

- Stephen

Karen has been out of town for a while so I've had some time to myself to think and reimagine my life and closely examine who I am and what I want to be. So I made up some New Years' Resolutions for myself. I have two.

1. Spend two hours EVERY SINGLE DAY working on my own stuff. No blogs, no internet, no games, no telephone. I'll be shutting off my telephone during these work times. The simple fact is that I need to spend time and energy doing things that matter to me. I'm constantly distracted and diverted by blogs, video games, my telephone, my personal life, etc. etc. I have to buckle down, show some discipline, and actually do some work. On many days, this will consist of walking around my apartment screaming and tearing my hair out. That's okay. The point is that my schedule is very tight and I will only have time for my work if I make it. This time can occur at any point, but must occur between 12:01am and 11:59pm. I encourage others with similar creative output in the last year (ie next to nothing) to do the same.

2. Upbraid myself and call myself a talentless, worthless hack during rewrites. REWRITES AND REVISIONS. I just found an old notebook and decent sections of writing are interrupted or entirely stopped by brief paragraphs about how worthless I am and how I will never be able to write no matter how hard I try. I need to save those feelings for when I'm doing revisions and rewrites, when those emotions are useful and helpful. If my magnum opus is abridged for six pages of "I AM SO FUCKING AWWWWWWWFUUUUULLLLLLLLLLLLL," then my work suffers.

What are your New Years' Resoltions?

Karen and I have been unable to locate a Wii, The Only Thing I Want For Christmas This Year, so instead Karen got me a subscription to Make magazine and put together this to-scale papercraft Wiimote. It's the next-best thing to dropping $400 on a Wii, an extra controller and nunchuck, and the new Zelda.

In what was the smelliest and best-attended Williamsburg nerd-down in recent memory, the Funde Razor 2006 rocked the shit out of Barcade Wednesday night. They raised $2350 to help little kids in hospitals all over the world play video games.

We showed up at about 7:45, with the event scheduled to start at 8, and the place was already packed like it was 11pm on a Saturday. By 8:30, the entire bar smelled like some unwashed nerd's couch cushion after a 36-hour gaming marathon.

The local fire department has a sign posted that it is unlawful and dangerous for the bar to contain more than 75 drunk nerds at a time, but according to the Funde Razor blog, representatives from the bar estimated between 250-300 of the roly-poly rockers.

With all the bodies and no discernible line for players to wait in, people rudely grabbed guitars at the end of songs or didn't get to play. Except for those with special equipment. My wife Karen totally 'girled' her way in for a round and played Search and Destroy with Legendary Guardian Auron, who made a surprise visit to Earth. And a greedy rocker he was, too. In a bar so packed with GH enthusiasts that it took twenty minutes just to get a goddamn beer, Auron played at least twice.

For shame, Auron.

I never got my hands on one but didn't mind. By the time I was close enough to grab the neck of a guitar, they were so warm and wet from palm sweat they made the subway pole on rush hour look sanitary.

I bought a bunch of raffle tickets at last night's Funde Razor to benefit little kids in hospitals who want video games. I ended up winning twice and received several strange items. The first 8 people who e-mail me their snail mail addresses @ sbruckert@gmail.com will receive something stupid that I won at a raffle.

Who said the Christmas spirit was dead?

Instructions for use:

1. Sip milk, hold milk in mouth
2. Press play
3. Write in comments section the time at which milk was projected from nostrils

(via Kotaku)

I was preparing to put together some past / present pictures of Lindsay Lohan for an entry about that crazy robot.

I figured that WireImage would be a place for me to get nice clean images to use for the entry. I was going to pay for the use and everything until I read their user agreement, which contains this passage:

CUSTOMER SHALL NOT AND AGREES THAT HE/SHE WILL NOT (i) SAVE, PRINT, COPY OR REPRODUCE THE CONTENT AND/OR IMAGES RECEIVED THROUGH WWW.WIREIMAGE.COM

Does that mean that simply using a modern web browser - which saves images to my hard drive as part of the cache - instantly violates the user agreement?

Yikes!

I guess it's back to taking my chances with google image.

Well, you know, um, I mean. She did. Tonight. On our guitar hero guitars. She did the uh. Tutorial? And then the uh. Whatsit? The uh.

I don't remember the first song she played.

But AFTER that she played War Pigs. And she totally rocked out and it was fun and funny. And I don't have pictures or video because I thought it would be weird and kinda creepy to even introduce myself, so when I set her up with the guitar and Karen taught her how to play, I mostly just pretended like I didn't know who she was. And I think it worked, because she didn't recognize me as the editor who was editing stuff she hasn't even seen yet.

I worry, I think, a little bit too much about on-or-near-the-job celebrity interaction. But I have a hard and fast rule that I have yet to have a good reason to break: totally pretend like you have no idea who they are. Which does not mean walk up to them, introduce yourself, and ask for their name. Treat them like you treat any other stranger in the room. Only talk to them if you have a really, really good reason.

What do you do when you're driving down an interstate highway at 1:00am the Sunday following Thanksgiving while you are the only car on the road and deer stand on the shoulders threatening to dart out without warning?

Why, the speed limit of course!

Which is what I was doing when I got pulled over by Connecticut State Policeman Deslaides (or something - his handwriting is unreadable), badge number 440 (or 448, 441, or possibly 446 - again, illegible handwriting).

As per usual, I had my license and registration (in this case, rental agreement) out and ready for him when he approached my vehicle.

"Good evening."

"Good evening, sir."

"Do you know why I pulled you over?"

"No, sir."

"Do you know how fast you were going back there?"

"Yes, sir. Sixty-five miles an hour."

"I clocked you back there at speeds ranging between 75 and 85 miles an hour."

"I find that pretty hard to believe, sir, as my cruise control was engaged and set to 65 miles an hour and plus with the deer I was being pretty careful with the speedometer."

"Well. My. Radar gun is calibrated. Your speedometer must be wrong. I'll be right back."

Fifteen minutes later he returns with a ticket for $213.

Anybody know how on earth I'm supposed to fight this? I know I can bring up all sorts of issues about calibration, etc. etc. if I actually WAS speeding, but since I was going the limit, I mean... What the fuck? I can't just say he was lying, can I?

Oh, and by the way, in case you haven't seen this already, I've got a nice little video here of our troops - camouflaged policemen, as far as I'm concerned - taking care of business.

And if this is what these armed, immune motherfuckers get up to when public television is following them around with a camera crew, I wonder what they do when no one is watching?

Maybe they rape little girls and murder entire families? Nah, of course not, that's something only a terrorist would do.

On the subway tonight, Karen asked me about the origins of leet (or 1337). This sent my mind wandering back all the way to the days of BBSs.

In my mind, the origin of l33t (a shortening and transmutation of 'elite') comes from Elite BBSs, where pirated software, plus tips and manuals on hacking and phreaking, were distributed. Back in those days, just as JPEG compression was emerging, people wanted bitchin' color graphics, but didn't have the bandwidth to include photo-quality images as part of the BBS interface (though many BBSs had jpeg libraries that you could search and download pictures from). Even a 640x480 jpeg could take more than a minute to download.

But we all still wanted sweet graphics! That's where ansi came in.

ANSI had an extended character set, including straight lines, corners, and blocks of different shadings. It allowed people to create relatively complex color graphics while still only using simple character sets that could be transmitted quickly between modems.

Aside from splash screens and the occasional menu on BBSs, ANSI art was often included with pirated software as a header for the release group's .NFO file describing what was in the .ZIP file, who the members of the group are, trash talking on other groups who didn't release the cracked game as fast, etc, which you still see sometimes today.

Many of the artists (and the users) adopted the look and feel of ANSI art and incorporated it into their handles (aka usernames) and signatures. Commonly this included substitutions of ph for f (and vice versa), numbers for letters, plus sign for a lowercase T, etc.

Anyway, on the internets of today, there are archives of much of that great ANSI art from back in the day, and a lot of the work is pretty impressive.

Go check 'em out to see how much the artists did with so little.

It will arrive on or before the 27th of this month.

Please post comments re: your availability for a screening.

When Karen and I went to see The Science of Sleep at the Angelika Film Center, there was a man outside selling DVDs of his movie, Imperfect Strangers. He told us that he wrote, directed, and starred in it and that it was a great movie. I know how hard it is to make an independant movie, so I bought a copy. I had no idea what I had just purchased.

Bennington Alum and ex-Jonathan Mann, Game Jew, sang one of his Wii songs to the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Communication at Nintendo, George Harrison.

We love you Jonathan!

The New York Times reported today that box office receipts are up 6.5% from last year, and attendance is up nearly 5%.

Despite the MPAA's failed attempt to bring down one of the world's largest bittorrent trackers, The Pirate Bay, this year, the industry is experiencing growth.

The MPAA, meanwhile, attributes the lack of an additional $18.2 billion dollars in their pockets last year to piracy. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how they came up with that figure, so I dug a little deeper. The MPAA's 2005 U.S. Piracy "Fact" (quotes mine) Sheet offers only this nugget in reference to the statistic: "Piracy loss calculations are based on the number of legitimate movies - movie tickets and legitimate DVDs - consumers would have purchased if pirated versions were not available."

So, okay, get this: to calculate their "losses" figure in anti-piracy press, the MPAA includes every illegal copy made, every bootleg sold, and every movie illegally downloaded as a lost sale. Not only that, but the MPAA couldn't possibly have reliable statistics for illegal copies, bootlegs, and illegal downloads. Why? Because such statistics don't exist and would be incredibly difficult to compile.

That's like estimating the number of blowjobs that happened in the United States last year by counting the married couples and multiplying by five.

To put the figure in perspective, Exhibitor Relations is projecting over $9 billion domestic box-office total. So, above and beyond the strange mathematics they used to calculate their "loss" figure, the MPAA estimates that the loss from piracy actually amounts to 200% of their annual domestic box-office gross *on a growth year*.

Oh, and MPAA, if you're listening, I borrowed my friend Eric's legitimate Old School DVD because I couldn't bring myself to see it in the theatre, buy the DVD, or rent the darn thing. It just looked too bad. But I watched it. And didn't pay for it. So add another $20 to that loss figure. Or $10, if you thought I'd see it at the theatre. Or $3.50 if you thought I would rent it.

In other news, Viacom's revenues up 7% in the third quarter, Microsoft's first quarter revenues up 11%, and Warner Music's revenue up 11% this past quarter.

So, there is this phenomenon. Where, you know, people... not, like, anyone I know or would talk to on purpose but. You know. PEOPLE. You've talked to them before. Who tend to compare people, organizations, or groups that they, the people making the comparison, view as unfavorable or generally 'not good,' these comparison-making people like to compare those 'not good' people, organizations, or groups to a certain historical figure or his, you know, historical nation-sized entourage.

Apparently, there is a name for this phenomenon. It is called 'Godwin's Law.' It has a wikipedia entry and everything. Go on over and read it. I don't want to ruin the surprise.

a movie so good
its worth survived worst film fate:
hollywood ending

Haiku review to come.
Thank you Dan @ Harmonix! And plus Everyone Else @ Harmonix!

There is a nice big profile of Will Wright in this week's New Yorker which, true to the style of the magazine, is also a brief history of video games and a peek at the industry at large.

Also contained in the article is this little piece of trivia:

In the spring of 1981, Wright answered an ad in a car magazine: Richard Doherty, a rally enthusiast, was looking participants to compete in a point-to-point race between Farmingdale, Long Island, and Redondo Beach, California. Wright had a Mazda RX-7, which he and Doherty modified with a larger fuel tank and a roll cage. They wore night-vision goggles so that they could drive fast in the dark without headlights and avoid the cops. “Will said we should take the southern route, even though it was longer, because if we got stopped he’d be able to talk to the cops,” Doherty told me. “We did get stopped in Georgia. We were doing a hundred and twenty, with no headlights, but it didn’t take Will more than a couple of minutes to make the officer see why he had to let us go without a ticket.” They won the race, establishing a new record of thirty-four hours and nine minutes.

... I cut and pasted that from their online version of the article, though I had a hard time finding it because the print version of the article says "In the summer of 1980..." versus the online version's claim that it happened "In the spring of 1981..." (I was searching for "summer".)

Anyway, you can read the whole damn thing without paying for it, but I suspect it'll be gone next week when the new issue comes out, so step to it.

Sam Tyndall may not always make the best decisions w/r/t members of the opposite sex. I, myself, have quite a few skeletons in my closet. Women whose feelings I have hurt, trusts I have broken.

I have, on occasion, been a bad boyfriend. I have been a post-relationship pseudo-stalker. Checking on people's blogs or doing searches for them long after they have asked me never to speak to them again. I've even blogged here about one such instance.

Well, now I know how it feels. Our main man Telephone Sam has an internet stalker that just won't give up. She has caused inconvenience and annoyance to every poster on this blog by posting comments relevant only to Sam Tyndall.

The IP addresses connected to the comments always resolve to Canada. Now, I know what you're thinking. How could you possibly know who the commenter is? There are 32,623,490 Canadians out there!

There is only one Canadian so fixated on our own personal Mr. T. Sorry, Sam. You might be big in Japan, but you just haven't blown up in our neighbor to the north.

As Grand Overlord And Person Who Pays The Bills of thatsplenty.com, I now pass a royal decree: The Canadian known only as Nathalie is no longer welcome here at thatsplenty.com and any and all comments made by her will be treated as spam.

Thank you for your attention. That is all.

Today, America lost a man who makes more money in one year than I will make in the entire rest of my life.

His job? To throw a ball.

Literally, the man made $3,300,000 this year as a ball thrower.

He will be missed, and the balls left unthrown will, in their stillness and proximity to the ground, leave a gaping hole in the psyches of all Americans, but especially New Yorkers. And Philadelphians. You know, 'cause he was on the Phillies for, like, two years. And Cincinnatians, they'll feel it too over at Great American Ball Park. (Yes, that really is the name of the field where the Reds play.)

Torontoans, they'll feel it too, and the Blue Jays might even have a moment of silence during their next game.

Cory Lidle can never be replaced.

Except by the next $3 million dollar ball thrower.

Let's have a moment of silence for the other 6,500 or so Americans who died today.

You can read the first two chapters in the saga here.

The seemingly neverending struggle with Verizon ended today in defeat. I have cancelled my internet service, despite having no alternative route for access.

But I had little choice.

This reminds me - when we got a comment from one of the guys that worked on Guitar Hero II (in response to an apocalyptic comment from me), I was like "Yeah, whatever. It's not Dan @ Harmonix, it's just some dude." But I got all traceroute on his IP address and sure enough we was writing from Harmonix.

And - BONUS - the gentleman that messaged us worked on some of my favorite games, has done some interactive fiction, and kept a book diary of everything that he reads.

After poking around his website, I was actually pretty flattered that he wandered over to our website to give me the business.

Thanks for setting me straight, Dan @ Harmonix!

For the last five months, I have been working 60 to 80 hour weeks with one exceptional 100 hour monstrosity that left me ragged and punch-drunk for days. I have never worked so much in my entire life. There have been dark times in my life when I did nothing but play video games, peeing in to bottles so that I wouldn't have to get up or leave the room. Even then I did not devote as much time to gaming as I have devoted to working in the last five months.

For a while, it felt good. I felt productive. I had never been needed so badly and I loved the thrill of being part of something so epic. I was proud of myself for being so dedicated, so relentless with my work ethic. Gradually, it started to hurt. I was at work more than I wasn't. Recently, I've started to lose myself. I've felt my personaltiy fading. When friends and family ask what I've been up to, all I can say is 'work.' My mind, which for all of my life has been teeming with stories, playfulness, and observations from the rich world I live in, is deserted. I'm empty, worn out, gutted and deadened. This is not the person I want to be.

This is my dad coolin' on the block with Stephen Hawking and two people I don't know. My father is a speech synthesis engineer and has been the head engineer on DecTalk since the 80s. He recently did some work to update Stephen Hawking's voice, which is why they are together for the picture.

My dad is the one with the beard that I am inching ever closer to resembling.

That's basically it.

This is a page that has completely captured my attention.

So as not to ruin your own particular experience of the thing, I will say no more above the jump and merely post the link.

This is how they roll during street fairs in Mississippi, apparently.

Somehow I doubt that town has a lot of Mexicans running around, anyway.

Fucking with Mexicans in Mississippi is like picking a fight on the internet. It's easy to act tough and be a douchebag because you're unlikely to ever meet your opponent.

From some guy's blog, located while doing a google image search for UNCRUSTABLES, a Smucker's product which is (this is true) a freezer box of individually-wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that already have the crusts removed which you merely have to thaw before eating.

The cardinal rule of The Simplification Project is Reduce Or Remove What Is Unnecessary.

On more than one occasion when I have seen someone so morbidly obese that they merit a mention to my friends, a quick elbow and a subtly pointed finger, I think to myself, "How do you ever reach that point? When you hit 250, shouldn't alarm bells be going off? You don't get that fat overnight. Once you hit 250, you go 'Holy fuck. Things are getting out of control. It's time to rope it in and shut it down.'" I thought that to myself, marveling at the overwhelming girth and often horrible stench of someone so fat that moving across a small room caused them to breathe heavily, never thinking that I, myself, would get to that alarm bell moment.

But I have.

I started planning for the simplification project in May, around the time of my 26th birthday. I am married, very busy, and no longer in school. But I do not feel challenged in my personal life, intellectually and spiritually. I wanted to change that. So the first of what I plan to be many projects is the simplification project.

A fascinating profile of Joe Francis, creator of the Girls Gone Wild series, from the L.A. Times.

Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He's pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"

It's after 3 a.m. and we're in a parking lot on the outskirts of Chicago. Electronic music is buzzing from the nightclub across the street, mixing easily with the laughter of the guys who are watching this, this me-pinned-and-helpless thing.

The article is a fascinating, excellent read, even while it tells you exactly what you expect to hear if you believe that Girls Gone Wild is garbage and possible only in a culture that is deeply misogynistic despite appearing to be liberated.

It reminded me of the things I hated most about highschool, spousal abuse I have witnessed, frat jocks I have endured, and the girls who mistook popularity for personal worth and tried to fuck their way to glory.

Anyway, read it.
(via boingboing)

This weekend, thanks to fellow blogger and all around swell guy Eric, not to mention team leader Stan and the whole rest of the team, I participated in a massive all-night-and-most-of-the-following-day scavenger hunt and puzzling extravaganza called Midnight Madness, inspired by on 1980 movie of the same name.

The following are videos and pictures from said event.

Excluded are pictures and videos that could be used against me in a court of law.

But first - the team picture. Team members can e-mail me for a hi-res copy.

A new definition of "parade" is going into effect on August 24 in New York City. This is yet another in a series of measures by the police to stop, detain, and generally harass bicyclists.

The new definition of parade will allow the police to arrest as few as two bicyclists riding together for "parading without a permit". I'm not kidding.

There will be a public hearing for the new definition at One Police Plaza on Wednesday, August 23, at 6 PM.

You can, and I suggest you do, attend the public hearing and contact the mayor about these new definitions. We must stop the criminalization of bicycle riding.

I never thought that sentence would come out of my mouth.

I wrote the Mayor a short, polite one. Read it after the jump.

News via Five Borough Bicycle Club.

Image of the 2004 RNC bicycle arrests courtesy Satan's Laundromat.

Whilst browsing the Apple website today trying to decide whether or not it was finally time for me to bite the bullet and buy Microsoft's industry-standard turdling Microsoft Office (or, instead, to pay a much more appropriate price) when I did a double-take at the above image.

Hidden on Apple's Microsoft Office page is an obscure reference to Kurt Vonnegut via Bokononism, his made-up religion that features prominently in his bookCat's Cradle.

8. Karen - 4 Posts
7. Sena - 7 Posts
6. Eric - 8 Posts
5. Wythe - 9 Posts
TIED FOR 4th Place - Dylan and Stephen @ 47 posts
3. Ryan - 68 Posts
2. Sam - 77 Posts

AND THE NUMBER ONE AWARD FOR MOST FREQUENT POSTER GOES TO

1. Michelle - 95 Posts

Congratulations, Michelle! You talk more than any of us. By a lot.

Doing in reality what was all but done practically, I killed my friendster profile today.

Dear friends, if you see me missing from your friends list, do not dispair. I did not drop you as a friendster. I dropped myself as a friendster.

Friendster is dead! Long live Myspace!

(Although, according to popular NYC blog Gothamist, Friendster was dead three years ago this month. Am I the antithesis of hip or what?)

Oh! Right. And Castro has ceded power, too.

Our apartment, a 700 square-foot poorly insulated, high-ceilinged beautiful monstrosity (with one full wall of glass) roasts us like chicken in a Ron Popeil Showtime Rotisserie Oven.

Besides being so big that our 13,000 BTU air conditioner huffs and puffs all day to no effect, all the glass lets heat from the sun in to the apartment without letting it go. We've soaked our sheets through every night for the last week or so from this heatwave, but not last night. Using strong impulses from our childhood, we devised a way to comfortably freeze our asses off all night long.

Here's how!

held my interest
Meryl Streep was amazing
Hathaway boring

So, as it turns out, Union Pool has wireless internet. I've never cared before, because I never had a laptop before. But so yeah, wireless internet at a bar. This was inspired by Dylan's liveblogging from the Soho Apple store.

I've got a link here to an exciting read on The Consumerist: an article about the AOL Call Center client retention guide.

By now you've probably all heard the audio of the guy trying to cancel AOL and finding it impossible to do so.

You've probably even heard about how "AOL sent him an apology and said the customer service rep was no longer with the company."

Well, as it turns out, he was just following his training.

Here's the upswing: If, in 2006, after all the time you've had to get used the internet, how it works, how your computer works, and how it all fits together and you're still using AOL then you are almost certainly old, unquestionably stupid, and deserve only the worst in access and service.

I mean, get this: I know someone with an AOL broadband account, and despite the fact that she has a router installed on her cable modem she can only use the internet on one computer at a time because AOL only allows you to use the internet on a computer that is currently logged in to AOL.

But I am not without my own stupidity: Verizon still owes us $120 and we still have not canceled the account or had the credit card company reverse the charges. And I can't take my service elsewhere; despite the fact that I live in the most populous city in America, Verizon is my only choice for high-speed internet service providers. Those motherfuckers.

Dear True.com,

Please stop advertising your site as an online retailer of women.

It's really grossing me out.

Sincerely,
Stephen Bruckert

It's over. The ashes have been sprinkled in Monterey Bay, and the people are slowly going back home.

Thanks to everyone who has been supportive during this difficult time.

Kevin

Ohhhh Sammy, this one is for you.

Evidently, AIDS patients have achieved a near-vampiric status. We already know that people with AIDS are frequently feared and reviled in our society, but the upswing to being a vampire has come around, too. According to a new Rolling Stone article, there are weirdos out there fetishizing the AIDS virus and looking for people to infect them, lusting after their moment of infection as the most erotic moment of their lives.

Hey, whatever dooms you to extinction, right?

But all in all, I can't decide if it's the article that's making me feel sick to my stomach, or the Todd Solondz-level upsettingness of co-worker Claire Square's music video for Cripple & The Starfish.

So there is this girl who fellated me once about six personalities and one hundred thousand years ago. When I recieved a message from an old friend today, I was reminded of this girl, so I went and visited her livejournal. Even though we never connected and only saw each other once, I remember her lj address because her username is 'motown.' Motown. I always think of the label on the Stevie Wonder CD that I had as a kid, and how it said MOTOWN across the front of it in blue ink.

Anyway, not much to report. Visiting her LJ always tells me the same thing: I don't know her, but I feel like we could be friends. But I have no way to contact her and she probably wouldn't like to hear from me anyway.

Which is boring, a dead end. I don't have enough time to see my own wife these days, let alone my friends, let alone some kindred spirit I spent the weekend with once.

The only reason I'm posting about her at all is because there was a link on her LJ that I followed, and I think it's worth checking out. I was really impressed.

I've added a new category for things I'm going to do once this crazy life-chomping job I have is over in early-to-mid July.

I will spend one day on a corner with two nintendo DSes, two cheapass folding chairs, and a sign that reads: "I Will Kick Your Ass at Tetris For $1 (Take your dollar back if you win.)"

I will do as the sign says until the batteries run out on the DSes, and then I will blog about it.

i have shrunk my world
to the size of five close friends
but miss everyone

I wrote the previous Verizon post on Monday before going to work, and forgot to post it.

Anyway, I have new news. This morning, Karen called me to tell me that the connection went down in our apartment. We were now without internet.

Once I got home, at about 10am, I called Verizon. The polite, though incompetent, yahoo I got on the phone ran me through his troubleshooting script for a good twenty minutes. He was clearly new on the job, perhaps even on his first week, because he kept thanking me for every piece of information I gave him, even thanking me whenever I told him that I had followed his latest instruction in the troubleshooting script. I held back the urge to say, "Sweetie, I'm a problem customer with special needs. Please put someone on who knows what they're doing." Bitch out a guy on his first week at a new job - it's like kicking a dog.

So, after what felt like hours waiting for him to finish reading his script, he called on actual technical support.

I have to call Verizon every two or three weeks due to connectivity issues. Sometimes my downstream rates, according to their own website, are closer to dialup than they are to the pitifully low speed I'm paying for (768kbits). Other times, I have no connection at all. Each time I have a problem like this, I have to call them three or four times because their woefully unqualified tech support staff insist that the problem is on my end. On the fourth call, I always manage to convince the representative to get a network technician on the phone who, whoops, finds out that something was wrong and fixes it. Until the next time...

Karen and I have had verizon DSL since February. Ironically, every time we move to a better neighborhood, our service worsens. In Bed-Stuy, we had OptimumOnline at the blistering speed of about 5mbits(!!) per second and I never once had connectivity issues. In Greenpoint, Time-Warner fed us a regular throughput of 3mbits(!) a second, and we had to call once when the wiring outside was shorting. Since we started Verizon DSL, we have downgraded from 1.5mbits to 768kbits at the suggestion of a network technician for the sake of "connection stability." We have called Verizon no fewer than fifteen times with problems on our connection. Now, the problem has spread.

Perhaps the saddest exhibit this year at E3 is a videogame version of Desperate Housewives. Apparently you sit around and talk shit about the other housewives? Well, I guess techincally here in the screenshot they're standing around. I bet the first development meeting went something like this:

"Okay. So Vivendi wants us to make a Desperate Housewives video game."

*groans*

"I know. But they've given us the money already. No, the president of the company signed off on it before leaving for some golf tournament somewhere. So. How are we going to make this happen?"

"Why don't we just, like, have some women standing around talking shit?"

"It'll be just like the TV show!"

"That's a horrible idea, John, but I can't think of anything else so we'll have to go with it. You start programming the 3d engine, make it look six years old like the original Sims. And then, uh. David? You can, uh. I don't know. Write some bitchy dialog."

"You know I'm no good at that crap!"

"Watch some episodes if you have to."

"Oh no! I have to watch the show to get ideas? I quit!"

How they ever got the game done, I don't know.

Also, on the E3 page, Tylenol has begun marketing itself as an EXTREME product.

Finally, a miracle product for the fat bastards who play so much they develop callouses and carpal tunnel? I guess sitting on your ass passes for extreme these days.

If you can get around the really annoying girl screaming, plus the "Gimme horns! Gimme horns!" clip looped no fewer than three times during the segment, you can watch a video about Guitar Hero II from the floor of E3. The most exciting news was that Primus not only agreed to include a song in Guitar Hero, but they gave Red Octane a MASTER TRACK, so the song we hear will not be a well-done cover, but the actual album version of the song.

SWEET.

To accomodate my cute dog, I am playing PS2 upside down and sideways. Also, if you look closely, you will see that my dog is spooning me.

He is cute.

I read an article about graffiti on gothamist.com today and started posting responses to it.

Here, go check it out.

http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/05/02/scratchitti.php

I just read all these comments about how offensive and terrible and awful graffiti is in the city, and I posted a response. I liked it so much I wanted my friends to read it here.

And it will never get any better.

Maybe I should save this for notbreastmilk.com.

It's my birthday soon.

Happy Birthday!

Dear Internet Users That I Know Personally,

Please stop sending me forwards. The story about Winston Churchill's life getting saved by the inventor of penecillin who was in turn saved by Churchill's dad or grandpappy or whatever, it's bullshit. It doesn't even make a good FAKE story. If you believe it, you are stupid. And if you think it's uplifting or interesting enough to pass on, then your emotional maturity level has just disqualified you from friendship with me.

should have been titled
"revised bits of my last book
plus a few new things"

The doorman or custodian or somebody, a tan-skinned elderly man wearing a puffy red and blue Adidas jacket, grinning below a trim Hitler moustache, wouldn't let me back in.

"The elevator is locked," I said.

He giggled and nodded, pointing to the keyholes.

"Can you let me in to the third floor?"

Still life with astroglide

More after the jump...

I am an assistant editor today. Today, this means spending the entire day scanning pages torn from magazines. The pages all have Paris Hilton's face on them. Yesterday, it meant transcribing an interview from a quicktime file. Tomorrow, it will probably mean more transcriptions.

Today, a college flunkout could do my job. The only reason I am doing what I'm doing is because it's not yet profitable to create, produce, and market an automated solution to scanning lots of documents. The job requires no skill or intelligence, just a pair of human hands to switch pages and press the button marked 'SCAN.'

I have just, again, switched documents and pressed 'SCAN.'

And again.

In between scans, I have about one minute. Literally, it takes about sixty seconds to scan one page.

That is just enough time to read a page of a novel. I have finished one today.

That is also just enough time to write a couple of sentences. That is what I am doing now.

It is not enough time to go to the bathroom, have a conversation, watch a trailer, or read a news article.

I have just enough time to do something small and interesting, but not enough time to work on anything else.

I think that today I will think up interesting and hilarious ways to get fired from this job.

I swear to god. I've got things cooking, things to share. I've got pictures of a shoot I worked on with the new ARRI D20 camera, ARRI's first video camera. An ARRI video camera, that's right. Crazy, I know.

I've got pictures of the Tennis Hoes vs. Golf Pros party, too.

I've got stories of long days on set and my latest bank balance after working for nearly a month of seven-day weeks. It's shocking. Honest!

But not right now. Right now I'm busy, I'm actually writing to you from work, and nobody knows I'm blogging. We've got clients arriving in an hour and a half and the office is a mess. The space is ages away from being ready for a shoot, but I'm still blogging. It's because I miss the site, I miss you guys and I hope you miss me. I keep checking that's plenty, but I haven't seen anything new for a couple of days.

Anyway. I hope to talk to you all soon.

I actually promised myself and told my boss that I needed two days to attend to my own business. But I got called in on this emergency. That's the way it goes.

Someday soon I'll have a day off. Someday soon, I promise.

It's already been so long since I've had time to get my life together that every dish in my apartment is dirty. I drink soup straight out of the can like a beer. I drink orange juice in the morning by pouring myself shot after shot in the collectible Budapest shotglasses Karen brought home from a trip to Hungary. I fork the lettuce in the salads karen makes by making a fist around four or five chopsticks and stabbing the leaves. I eat ice cream straight out of the carton without a spoon by squeezing the bottom of the pint and licking the bucket-shaped "scoop" that pops up.

My laundry is long, long overdue. Even after a shower, the crotch on my unwashed pants smells so strongly of ballsweat that Moksi sniffs at my junk as though carefully reading my genetic history. He is fascinated, captivated, enraptured by my stink. I have never seen him so fascinated, so preoccupied. He is focused on my balls, with the concerned concentration of a grand master playing tetris.

I will have a day off soon.

So we mentioned before that we're all hooked on Guitar Hero here at That's Plenty headquarters. Tonight, as last night, we all rallied together at Juggernaut Unlimited Ltd. for a nice hot round of the best game of all time.

Now, you may be familiar with a certain facial expression known as Guitar Face. It is a phenomenon that has been scientifically documented

I took tonight's guitar hero roundup to capture the face... the GUITAR face of that's plenty.

My #1 favorite is published only in my brain, so don't bother checking the site for a post you may have missed. #2 is the first to be posted.

On my way to Juggernaut Unlimited Ltd. tonight, a pair of male albino twins boarded the subway car Karen and I were riding. They both wore bluejeans, a black nondescript winter jacket, and a black baseball cap. They held on to the pole in the middle of the car with their right hands, each facining opposite directions, each holding a white shopping bag in their left hands. They rode the train for three stops and got off. Their entire ride I stared at the one facing me and he stared back.

Friends and contributors will be interested to know that, up from #3, we are now the #2(!!) google search result for 'that's plenty'. (And also #2 result without the apostrophe.)

We are the #1 google search result for "That's Plenty". (You know, in doublequotes.)

This American Life, if you haven't heard it yet, is the best radio show to come along in quite some time. I mean, that's not necessarily saying much. With Sirius and the Internet and, well, you know, television too, radio has seemed like a dead format to a lot of people for a long time. So let me put it another way: I listen to This American Life as religiously as I watch The Daily Show.

Though I often miss it because I'm busy, asleep, or crazy on Sundays. It's one of my days off. So I do what I want. I don't watch the clock. But today I've been listening to the one I missed this weeked, Habeas Schmabeas, an hour long special about the Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

I don't want to ruin it, but it's even worse than you thought it was. Aside from the shocking expose style stuff you might expect about the abortions of justice, there are long interviews with prisoners that have been released.

Everyone should hear this. (You need realplayer.)

I'm not looking forward to our children asking us "Why didn't you do anything?" when they learn about this war in history class 20 years from now.

Quest alone and die
No fun for soloists here
Warcraft is better

This is what my commute looks like.

So.

Right when I've hit a low re: the inevitable end of everything good, the hoplessness of creating something genuine, true, good, worth seeing, etc. against the all-consuming powerful market forces that propel our culture, our very world, towards Purchasing Goods and substituting Consumer Decisions for happiness, love, joy, interaction, and how no matter what we do to resist and circumnavigate the Choad, we have to pay the motherfucking goddamn landlord at the end of the month and however sad and difficult and unbelievable it may be the fact remains that joy, love, community, etc. are not feelings or events that generate the money needed to pay said motherfucking goddamn landlord, and yet somehow all of the things that dehumanize us as a race, the things that divide us and commodify us, change us from people into 8 hour chunks of Work Units to be used up and distributed and fed, housed, and clothed just enough to return to the workplace the following day to become once again Daily Work Units in exchange for just enough food and warmth and fashion to encourage us to return the following day but never enough to permanently or even temporarily free us, those are the things the somehow Generate Income.

Right when all this is crushing me, emotionally, inside, and causing me to seriously contemplate returning home, going back to Massachusetts or perhaps Los Angeles to live rent-free with family members while I continue to try and sort out why I'm here on this wretched ball of dirt infected (the ball of dirt is, not me) by a virus with shoes determined to turn every river, tree, and emotion into a dollar until, ultimately, there is nothing left on the planet but money and the bones of the virus that struggled to horde it...

Well.

So. Right then.

Here it is.

This is an article about the neighborhood we all live in.

If you don't have an ny times account, sign up. You have to to look at it, but it's free and you get a free electronic edition of the paper in your e-mail every day.

I'm not really interested in money. I don't care about it. When I was a bartender, for months I had a hard time taking tips from customers. I just don't like money. After I had to bug my dad for money a few times to help pay my rent, I ended up working extra hard at the bar to make sure I was earning all the tips I got, but I never got lazy on people.

I would work just as hard as I do now, maybe harder, even if I didn't get paid. I love my work and I love working hard and I'm good at what I do. Long nights working on shoots is quite a rush for me.

I'm wandering. Excuse me.

Okay. So this is my point: The entire world, specifically America and specifically New York city, is focused, more or less, on the dogged pursuit of money. Often, the most efficient ways of gathering money involve deceiving or hurting other people.

Non-participation is impossible at worst and a failed endeavor at best. Because, eventually, you're going to have to buy food or pay your rent. Even if you live on a commune where you grow your own food, you're going to need to buy the gasoline to power your farm equipment, pay for the electricity to keep your refrigerator going, pay for the water that keeps your crops going.

Even if you use modified diesel engines and vegetable oil to power your farm equipment, keep your fridge up with solar power, and rely on rain and irrigation, you're going to have to pay property taxes on your land.

You cannot live without money unless you are a homeless scavenger, living off the fat of the land.

Which, you know, is possible, but not an altogether pleasing existence, if you judge by the smell. Which I do. I don't ever want to smell like the homeless people that make entire train cars smell like morgues suffering from week-long power failures.

You know that whole thing Dylan is talking about, with the fun and pressumo and Jim and everything?

Well, I've been dying to see Jim too. It's been so long! He even wrote me these sweet, like, LOVE letters on friendster about how much he missed me and how much fun we were going to have when he got home.

But between winter sucking all the juice out of my body and my dog turning me in to a morning person, I went to bed at 8pm last night.

EIGHT PEE EM ON A SATURDAY NIGHT. BECAUSE I WAS TIRED ENOUGH TO FALL ASLEEP.

I woke up at Seven this morning. Check out the time of this entry. I'm not even fucking lying to you.

Will someone pick me up so we can take my dog to the pound together? I should be waking up at noon for chrissakes!

7am! On a Sunday! FUCK!

I don't wake up this motherfucking early on workdays! Do you understand how upsetting this is?!

Do you!?

This is GOATSE upsetting.

EAT THIS, FUCKERS!

"Tell me a story."

The camera operator had sat down on the weathered wooden bench that rested on the balcony, thirty-eight stories up near times square, that we had come to in order to get a quick establishing shot for a new TV show. He had two magazines to load and a while to wait after that. We had a good half-hour or so before the light would be good for the shot. He was older than me, but wanted to hear one of my yarns. I tried to oblige him, but needed to warn him. I was a pretty reserved and unadventurous fellow. Except in one category of my life.

"They're all stories about women," I said.

He smiled. "Perfect," he said. "Those are the best kind."

I started with the one that gets the quick, easy laugh out of most people.

"This one time I got dumped for my sister."

and I love reading everyones posts even though Sam writes about tracks every day that I never get the chance to listen to.

One of these days I'm going to put them on my ipod first thing in the morning every day and I'll listen to them on my way in to work.

I am greatful for Ryan's entries about things I don't understand except that I do but I don't really think about them so reading about them is totally new and interesting.

You know?

And as for Karen, well, she gets ideas just forgets to write them. Plus I hog the computer at home.

Speaking of hogging the computer, mine blew up. It is now an ex-computer. My hope is that my way-too-expensive video card is intact, as well as all of my data, but I do know for sure that the computer is not POSTing. Which is a biggie but a smallie.

It basically means that the motherboard is kaput.

Which means I have to buy a new one.

But do I buy a new one AND a new chip? Or just a replacement?

Please consider that I only got the chip a matter of months ago. It IS an AMD64, after all.

I just can't find any reviews of socket 754 motherboards dated later than august of last year, and it makes me feel like a dinosaur.

But I actually check this blog now almost as much as I check gothamist and boingboing.

I love that.

And now I have to get some laundry out of the dryer.

Would anyone like me to post pictures of my hemorrhoids?

Love, Me

He was born and raised in the Bronx, is black, and does not fart. Not around me, anyway.

"Burritos? I want burritos. You can eat whatever you want but before we leave this island I need burritos."

"Burritos is cool with me, man, that's fine."

"No, really, we can stop anywhere you want and get food you like but I need to have a burrito. I could eat a burrito every day for every meal for the rest of my life and die happy. I need a burrito."

He laughed. "Cool. Burritos."

Once he figured out that you pronounce C-H-I-P-O-T-L-E as "chip-oat-lay," Sam knew exactly where to find one of their fine restaurants on our way to JFK. We stopped and I wrote down my simple vegetarian order on a scrap of paper. He even had the good sense to call my cell from inside and ask me what I wanted to drink.

I was reminded of how earlier in the day he held back as we loaded heavy equipment into the production office. He held back to keep the door open for me and when it was my turn to return the favor, I let it close in his face.

"Oh shit. I'm sorry."

"No problem," he said without any hint of frustration.

I am an idiot.

So, once he returned from Chipotle with two burritos, a water and an apple juice, we took off on our supersonic rocketship, actually a KIA minivan with one of the back seats taken out, and he asked me, "You ready for that burrito now?"

I was and said so. I ate the fucker one handed, navigating with the other hand through single lane one-way streets with cars parked on each side, the midtown tunnel, and JFK traffic. By the time I had popped the butt of the burrito in my mouth there was a coating of guacamole shellac on the steering wheel. I wiped my fingers off on the bag and held on to the steering wheel with oversized napkin mitts.

We were on the hunt for Building 77 at JFK airport. We had been charged with the task of... well, it wasn't exactly clear. We had to get customs to check out some cases that we had been given, but we were never told what the proper verb was or what we were to return with. The Production Manager had called me specifically, he said, because he needed someone willing and able to gatecrash the bureaucratic bullshit they expected to encounter at the airport and fight through to success.

I'm sick to death of the FPS genre. Please, for the love of God, this a plea to all video game makers in the world, please please please stop making FPS games.

We all played Doom and Doom II ten years ago, and more recently we played Half-Life and Half-Life 2. We thought that bullet time was pretty neat in Max Payne, Max Payne 2, and F.E.A.R. Commanding other guys was good in the ten Rainbow Six games that have come out, plus in SWAT and the other one that Konami just did. But even while we were slogging through terrorists and vampires with telekinesis, we were all thinking that the shit was pretty tired. It's still just Doom II with a few new features and better graphics.

Please, I beg of you video game developers, let it die.

I fear for the future of my children. I grew up in an age where the FPS, MMORPG, RTS were born and blossomed, and finally a few years ago the Sandbox genre exploded with Grand Theft Auto and its many successful franchises, but once you've played GTA then Vice City, San Andreas, Ultimate Spider Man, True Crime New York (or whatever it's called) and the 800 other Sandbox games... well, you're just playing GTA all over again with a new skin.

I know that the market for video games has expanded, as have the budgets, and so it's becoming riskier and riskier to produce games. And I feel for you, I really do. Nobody likes to lose money.

So I beg of you, for my children's sake primarily, but yes, also for the sake of your precious profits and the continued profitability of the video game market in general... experiment. Be willing to make a few duds for the sake of the next GTA, Dune, Doom, and the rest of it. With ever-expanding technology there should be ever-expanding possibilities for video games. But the industry has suffered a lapse reminscent of the Hollywood bug that has been plaguing the studios worse than if you could distribute 35mm prints over the internet. They've stopped trying, they've stopped having fun, and they're just doing terrible bullshit copycat "products" that they feel safe producing and releasing because their new game is just exactly like the twenty other games that came out before and were successful.

I was browsing a local retailer recently and stumbled upon a new game from Konami for the PC. Konami! I thought to myself. They typically produce material for the console! I wonder what strange new offering they have for my powerful processor back home! I flipped the box over and saw something that made my blood run cold: screenshots of a view over the barrel of a gun which was pointed at some nasty looking guys standing around on a rooftop, in an office environment, and in a sewer who were also all holding guns. And I thought to myself I wouldn't download this shit for free off the internet. Who would pay for this?

Please. Stop it, video game industry. I beg of you.

And by the way, if anyone was wondering, Call of Duty 2 is great if you haven't already played Call of Duty 1. If you have and you play CoD2, then you'll be wondering if you clicked the wrong icon. I got it two months ago because I was so impressed with the first, and it's so similar to the first that I never even bothered to clear the first campaign. It just felt like replay.

On the other hand, I have been playing Battlefield 2 from time to time, and still get a lot of enjoyment out of that. But I fall out of my chair when I get killed by someone bunnyhopping. When will developers ever fix that?

My next post will be relevant to life, I swear.