Subtle Bluntness

This is in honor of my first 100% singing performance on Rock Band 2.  It was this very song, Everlong, and I have to say that I absolutely crushed it.  CRUSHED IT.  I also managed to crack 90% on the song below, which is almost as difficult as Dylan’s Tangled Up In Blue singing-wise.  Well, more difficult singing wise, but Dylan’s stattaco delivery is a bitch to emulate.  I even added the curse words back in where they’re supposed to be (since you can’t say fuck and shit in video games).

So, Twitter is going to be joining forces with Reveille Productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners for a television show.  And yes, it’s going to be as bad as you first assumed when I mentioned Twitter TV:  It’s going to be a celebrity stalking reality gameshow.

I will now go exfoliate with a belt sander.

I know it’s probably going to be on Fox, and I know it’s probably going to be a huge flop, but this is exactly the kind of attention Twitter DOES NOT need.  When you’re not making any money, you at least want to keep a core group of audience that you can direct ads at (when you finally run out of venture capital).  Twitter isn’t GM; people are lining up to give money to Twitter for no good reason, so why the rush to whore the service so hard?

Throwing the doors open for the crowds when you can barely handle your daily traffic is probably a bad idea.  This is the sort of stunt Twitter should be pulling after they’ve figured out how to monetize the surface, not before they can afford to pay for upgrades.  If Oprah’s army of bored housewives can crash Twitter, I shudder to think what any decently-sized TV debut for this show would do to the service.

It took a long time for Twitter to get respect as a legitimate, useful tool, and it only takes one incredibly stupid decision to ruin all that positive groundwork.

In happier, healthier times, I was reviewing baseball games for the Wii.  But in this dark day, I’ve found myself repeating my name and address about a thousand times on doctor forms. Two things I love: obnoxious bureaucracy and paying someone to tell me something’s wrong with me!

As it turns out, I’ve never been to an adult doctor in this town, so I had to be treated as a new patient (though I went to this doctor a million years ago to get my shots before high school just to be in their system… turns out they lost me after me not going back to them for 14 years).  Long story short, after a lot of waiting and a lot of coughing, I’ve got an upper repiratory ailment and serious throat irritation.

I got a bottle of horse antibiotics (what better cruel joke to play on someone who can’t swallow liquids than to give them gigantic pills?), a bottle of green death cough syrup that doesn’t have enough codeine to knock me out, and orders to pick up some Mucinex D.  (”No, pharmacist, I will not turn this into crystal meth, I promise.  Now please put down the taser and give me back my ID.”)

Oh yeah, to put the icing on the cake, they had to have the nurse give me a shot.  Not in the arm, either.  Apparently once you start growing hair under your arms, they stop giving out candy to good boys who don’t scream and cry during the stabbing of the tender behindus.  I’m disappointed; I was kind of hoping for a tequila pop.

Now if I ever get caught using steroids, I can honestly say I’ve had someone I don’t know inject me with God knows what.  So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

I’ve never played Portal, yet I love this song, as I’ve said back before FGF was invented.  I absolutely hate the goofy faces the host guy is making in this video, but Jonathan Coulton is awesome as always.  This is, quite possibly, the happiest, most feel-good song ever sung by a homicidal computer.  HAL 9000 was great and all, but this is just so chipper!

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a post about the great coffee and prunes debacle of 2008.  I’ve completely learned my lesson when it comes to that shit (sorry).  No, this is a post about the complicated and unpleasant process of transferring this blog from Wordpress to the Dot Com.

When I’d try to transfer over my stored backup files, it would take two, even three attempts to get all the files to port over.  You know, I’m used to having trouble with FTP clients, so that’s not a huge deal.  You just keep trying until it’s successful.  Somehow, though, things are different when it comes to installing a WordPress (for the sake of brevity and laziness, let’s just call it WP) backup.  Namely, when my upload would crap out (more poop references, I’m very sorry) and I would reinitialize the transfer, it ended up not overwriting the old posts, but adding duplicate posts!

So for most of the blog entries pre-September, sometimes instead of one blog post, I’d have two with the same title, and I didn’t know about it until browsing through my archives to look for a specific post to back link to.  Then I saw I had three of those posts, I knew I screwed something up.  So I went back through the archives and when I saw two posts with the same title together, I saved one and deleted the other(s).  I missed some, I’m sure, but I’ll find them eventually.  Probably while uploading ancient reviews of movies no one cares about because they don’t realize how awesome Miles O’Keeffe is.

I also have no sidebar on the side of my individual entries, which is further proof I screwed something up.  I’ll admit that I’ve long since given up hope at figuring it out.  For a guy who has spent years working on websites and tinkering with HTML, I lack the skills needed to build from the ground up or easily diagnose problems.  I also would like to make the little picture deal above a link back to the homepage, but that means I’d have to poke around in the CSS.  I am too full of lazy and short-tempered for that, though when it finally infuriates me badly enough I may try to fix it.

Right now I’m just glad the stupid blog is visible.  That in and of itself is a small miracle, thanks in no small part to just how tough it was to get both this and PopFi running off my hosting space.  Now if I could just get the Analytics code to run on SB (and to make the site more google robot friendly with post titles with words in them, rather than numbers…)

At the moment I’m playing a video game, reading a movie review, watching MST3K on my laptop, and on the TV is Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (the gayest movie in history) from FearNet On Demand.  I am not sated.  None of this is doing anything to make me any less bored, antsy, and generally malcontented.

Why do I need this constant electronic stimulation?  Why can’t I just read a book or magazine without the need for some kind of background noise?  Why can’t I drive in silence?  Why can’t I just watch one thing at a time, rather than multi-task?  Can I really call this multitasking, when absolutely none of it is productive and I’m not even really paying attention to any one thing for more than a few seconds at a time?

Yeah, I know this is pretty much territory I’ve already covered, but one of the symptoms of this unfettered spirit is that I also can’t focus long enough to come up with a decent idea for my mandatory blog post today.  Ergo, I just talk about how I’m beating my attention span to death with a constant stream of noise and flashing pictures.

Maybe this is all a sign I’ve got too much on my plate.

I can’t wait until watching all these screens all the time gives me eye cancer.  I kind of feel like Prison Director Poe sitting in front of Zed-10 in my creepy sterile lair, fantasizing about Christopher Lambert’s wife and randomly intestinating prisoners.  (That’s all a reference to Fortress, which is one of my favorite Stuart Gordon movies.  I could also reference Videodrome, but this feels more obscure.)

I mentioned it in passing yesterday, but it’s been published now, so you can read the article (that was supposed to be a blog post) but turned into its own giant treatise on the potential for a zombie MMORPG.

Long story short, I think that the time for a zombie MMORPG is, well, now.  Between XBox Live, the PlayStation Network, the Wii’s online capability, and general availability of high speed Internet, people have never been this interested in playing games online before.  If you can strike while the iron is hot, look outside the high fantasy and science-fiction genres, and attach a marketable name (Resident Evil) to whatever zombie MMO you’ve got, you can reach a whole lot of people.

Author’s note:  My lack of focus is apparent even in that article.  This is how my mind works.  I can’t contain it, let alone stop it.  May as well just run with it.

As you might or might not know, World of Warcraft and I have been in an on-again, off-again relationship for quite some time. I’ll admit, I haven’t always been faithful. I’ve had flings with old girlfriends (Fallout), I’ve got a lady on the side as a casual thing (Guild Wars), and occasionally I’ve been known to go out and shake it at the club with some hoochies (the Wii), but I always come back to my old faithful WoW. Well, not exactly faithful, since there are 10 million other people pwning her on a daily basis, but she always put out for me, and that’s all I ask.

I strayed again recently. It was a tawdry 9 ½ WeeksDays I spent exploring every sticky, tight crevasse of Lord of the Rings Online, but it wasn’t love. Not like it is with WoW. She’s not as pretty as LotRO, but she’s a lot more fulfilling, has more content, and lets you thoroughly explore her end-game content unlike the one-trick pony that is LotRO. Like that gay cowboy movie said, “I wish I knew how to quit WoW.”

Over at the Electronics Shack, I posted a link to a Knight Rider case mod that was featured over at Engadget, and complained about the lack of Panjabi MC music being played by the KITT case. Of course, since I posted the video of the KITT mod over there, I couldn’t very well post the YouTube video of the song, either. Howevah, here at my personal blogodecahedron, I can post whatever the hell I’d like, and I’d like to share with you some Indian music video that I found.

Now, I don’t know anything about India. I’ve watched a Bollywood film or two at my old friend Apu’s place, but all the singing and dancing and the lack of subtitles left me horribly confused, and Apu didn’t translate fast enough, so I was mostly just enjoying the lights and noises. I’d like to actually check out some Bollywood films with subtitles (not dubbing), so if anyone has any good recommendations, I’d love to hear them. If they’re as interestingly insane as the above video, then I’m totally down for more.

India looks like an awesome country, if only from this music video. They should just send this out as part of their tourism drive. I mean, this and the Taj Mahal are about all you need, right? Blonde Travolta can be the subcontinent’s version of Paul Hogan!

Yeah, that’s right. They’re going to make a video game based on the multiple-Oscar winning cinema classic Saw! Some snippets from the article above, for those too lazy to read:

There’s no real word on what the game play will be like, but I can only see it going in one of two directions. It will either be like Rockstar’s Manhunt with less plot, or Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series but with absolutely no fun. Either way, I see blood by the gallons, genitals in bear traps, and absolutely no redeeming social values whatsoever other than the important lesson, “It hurts to stick tender bits into bear traps, so don’t do it.”

Finally, a violent video game Uwe Boll can’t make into a movie!

Of course, I make a great recommendation for a MMORPG I’d dump WoW to play in a heartbeat (not Fallout this time, but a different one [though I will be playing the Fallout MMORPG]), but if I told you what it is here, you wouldn’t have to go read it, now wouldya?