When I’m feeling down I stop masterbating for two days and eat nothing but fruit. Then once 48 hours pass, after I’ve I really missed the little things in life like junk food and self pleasure I buy a bucket of KFC and watch four hours of porno. It makes me feeeeel better and more confidant.

Since my life is in more ruin the any of you could ever imagine, I’ve found some things than can help you overcome your whatever.

You can start by telling people what you want instead of pussyfooting around it. If you want five extra pounds of cheese on your pizza, tell the fucking person at the pizza place what you want instead of worrying about them laughing at you for having disgusting eating habits. They are working at a pizza place=they don’t matter.

Any girl that isn’t in your daily “routine” that is midly attractive-ask out. You never have to see her again, she doesn’t know about your endless problems, and if she says no, SHE’S JUST A DUMB CUNT that doesn’t know any better.

If you are not overweight and are over 30 YOU HAVE WON! This society breeds fat cattle. If you are still skinny after 30 years of walking around this smorgasborg, you have attained the rank of Arch-Mage.

And finnally, there are thousands of people out there who WANT to be your friend. Ever jackass place I’ve worked for had at least 5 people who wanted to be my friend. Unfortunatley I hate everyone and don’t require friendship. But the only way to overcome your fears is to take a chance on these cretins and hang out with them. After hanging out with them twice you may actual befriend someone.

Editor’s note: We take you back to right before the release of Spider-Man 2. Comic book movies were in chaos. One “man,” the following clown, knew what the problems were and how to fix them. We now take you to his post at the time.

While you guys are eagerly anticipating your next 8 sided die roll or thaco check, I’m eagerly awaiting the Release of Spider Man 2. I was an avid comic book reader growing up and am happy that Hollywood is now able to portray our favorite heroes without making them look gay or cheesy.

But I do have a huge problem with the formula. In every one of these movies:

1. The origin of the character is fucked up.

2. He is almost always the ONLY super hero in the world

3. The Lois Lane or Mary Jane character that took Superman and Spider-Man 300 issues to ask out, drops her pants in the first movie.

4. The characters our heroes battled for hundreds of issues are killed within a week’s time (in the movie)

5. Huge gaffs: (Harvey Dent being played by Billy D. Williams then Tommy Lee Jones, Spider-Man shooting webs out of his skin, the lumping together of Mary Jane and Gwen Stacey and the biggest one of all time-the Hulk movie.)

Here’s what should have been done

1. Case: Batman movie kills Joker too damn soon.

Solution: Let the joker beat Robin to death with a crowbar like in the comic book and have him escape. THAT WAY YOU CAN BRING HIM BACK, LOSE THAT FAG O’DONNELL AND when you run out of ideas by the fourth movie you bring the Joker back and leave ARNOLD the fuck out of it.

2. Case: Two Face being played by two different actors in two different movies one black (Billy D. Williams) and one white (Tommy Lee Jones)!

Solution: I agree Hollywood owed Billy D. big time, Lando shoulda got his own spin off movie called Streets of Calrisimo. So leave Billy D. as Harvey Dent and have him framed of a crime he didn’t commit. That way Tommy Lee Jones can still participate and play the cop who is in charge of finding a wrongly accused man.

3. Case: While it is implied that Mary Jane Watson is a slut for dating three characters in one movie, it isn’t really addressed.

Solution: Spider-man Ticket stub good for discount on Raylenne’s “American Web Guzzlers” DVD.

4. Case: All super hero movies operate in different universes i.e. you don’t see Spider-Man ever dropping by the Avengers Mansion.

Solution: I understand they can’t throw all these guys together probably cause of licensing, blah, blah. But a passing mention like Spider-Man checking his cell phone and listening to the black cat leaving a message about how “She’s late.”

5. Case: The (original) Hulk Movie

Solution: everyone involved must be shot.

I was dead once. The Mclurg kids next door were fucking around banging on the walls while I was taking a bath. I got up to go yell at them and banged my head on the shower-head, knocking me out and sending me to an untimely death in a pool of my own stink. Luckily my future ex-wife had to use the crapper and walked in after I had been face down in disgusting bath water for god knows how long. By the time paramedics had arrived I was pronouced dead.

After getting those electric shocks I came to about 40 seconds later. I sat and looked around. Those goddamned kids were still banging around, my ugly wife had stunk up the bathroom and I owed my life to some pimply face squared assed lesbo Paramedic. I screamed to God- “If you are going to kill me, at least have the balls to finish the job. ” I took up smoking the next day.

A haunting memory from the past comes back today.

TIMELINE: DECEMBER 30, 2004

Apparently a wall of water dumped on a large number of people in the Indonesia region, giving millions of people their first baths in months. Unfortunately the sight of clean fingernails caused about 120,00 people to perish. No, there won’t be any jokes about Bush blaming this on Iran, although I think he should. All of that goddamned oil drilling probably caused a shift in the tectonic plate. If he were to use that as a basis for war against another axis of evil, well, good enough for me.

No, the tragedy runs deeper. When I was but a boy I remember taking what was called social studies. I always liked the way they named classes. Some schools called it Geography. Some schools called math- Arithmetic and some schools called English.. Language Arts. No matter how they dressed anything up you knew you were going to be lugging a shitty textbook around for the next 8 to 9 months.

In my Social Studies textbook, I remember that the sons of bitches that made it had the audacity to predict the world population for the year 2060. The graph looked something like this.

http://www.gumption.org/1993/memo/landmarks/world_population.gif

Notice the disturbing trend. Everything is fine and dandy for a hundred thousand years and then all of a sudden the thing erects itself like one of you looking at naked pictures of Lieutenant Uhura.

Well Bullshit I always said. How the fuck does some idiot publishing company think they have the right to pretend they know how many people are going to be around in 50 years. Take this unfortunate event called Tsunami, or as I call it natures -Level 3 population control. People breed in Southeast Asia like the women are attractive or something. Everyone knows that if you are attractive and female in SE Asia the following precautions are taken.

1. Violently taken from your home at the age of 12.
2. Reproductive organs removed with crude tools
3. Sold to a brothel
4. Have sex with foreign businessmen for the next 20 years.
5. Reunited with family on 60 minutes
6. Killed in natural disaster.

If you are a promising young male
1. Violently taken from your home at the age of 12
2. Reproductive organs removed and ground into powder for “herbal supplement”
3. Sold to a brothel
4. Have sex with middle age men for 5 years
5. Go to work for Tech Company in U.S.

The rest of the people are left sitting around breeding and making small toys and appliances. They also have kids at the rate of 1 per when the stitches come off.

Which brings me to my point. With world population growing rampant, and the thought of some hippy social studies book writer being right, nature steps in. Nature takes small steps like taking over the mind of 20 Saudi’s and forcing them to crash airplanes into buildings. It takes medium steps like creating diseases like AIDS and whooping cough. And then once in a while it says “fuck it” and forces the water (the deadliest force in nature’s abundant repitoire) to rise up and wipe out hundreds of thousands.
In review
Level 1- Nature controls human minds for dasterdly deeds
Level 2- Diseases, animal exctintion, the slow death
Level 3 Natural Disasters in highly populated poor countries
Level 4- natures Level 4 population control is called “Global Killer” THIS GUY gets a phone call
http://marvelite.prohosting.com/surfer/galactus/profile.html

Discuss!

During this time of the year, my thoughts, as I’m sure yours do, often turn to red, ripe tomatoes. So, I was more than pleased to take up Vitriola’s suggestion of Bud Light Chelada, a beer containing: Clamato, salt, lime flavoring, and, rumor has it, some actual beer. Friends, this could very well be the fight of my life.

So, goodbye, everyone!! I’m disappearing into Tomato World one last time.

BEER: Bud Light chelada

I know, right? No tomato-based complaining, please. Besides, Pinback wouldn’t want you to bitch.

With an info blurb mentioning “Latino love” and having a can where almost every word slapped across it is in Spanish, I have a sneaky suspicious I’m not AB’s target audience. Even choosing Bud Light Chelada could’ve proved to be disatrous, as I wasn’t entirely positive it was available in my area. Thankfully, my local gasoline purveyor delivered the goods, or, at least, had said goods for sale in 24 ounce, big-ass cans. Mose down at the Shell station even said it was “a fine seller”. No, Mose, you’re the fine seller. He also took the opportunity to recommend Schlitz High Gravity V.S.L, but that’ll have to wait for another time.

FD&C Red Dye #40, in terms of appearance, with a fizzy, pinkish head on top, it’s simply far too cheery-looking to raise much of a fuss. What harm could a Strawberry Shortcake-hued brew really do?

In terms of aroma and flavor, this concoction is somewhat akin to a thin tomato soup. Yeah, that’s certainly one way of putting it, but it’s not just any thin tomato soup we’re dealing with. Throw in some vegetable stock, a questionably high amount of celery salt, a few hearty squirts of premium ketchup, a pinch of salt, a splash of light beer, and you’ll be on the right track. A hint of lime adds a tiny hit of acidity. Mercifully, I don’t pick up any clams. The beer finishes with a watery flourish and an all-too-telling Latino wink.

“I’ve just sucked one year of your life away.” –Count Rugen

Once, while attending the Great American Beer Festival some years ago, I had a chance to meet Michael Jackson, the Beer Hunter, the celebrated author of many a beer book. During a brief exchange, he gave me this snippet of advice: “When it comes to new beer styles, Gerrit, you’ve got to grow and become more open-minded; accept tomatoes, maybe even embrace tomatoes.” At the time, I dismissed the comment, thoroughly sure that his advanced age and decades of getting soused had rendered him completely senile.

Looking back, though… maybe he was on to something. No hard feelings, Michael, right?

Overall, Bud Light Chelada isn’t as entirely foul or offensive as one might rightly imagine it to be. I didn’t once spit up on myself! I never once accused it of being a life-altering nightmare! That being said, I don’t see myself returning to this one anytime soon. In fact, you had all better cherish this one final trip to Tomato World, because that’s pretty much it for the tomato beers.

Though, while I may be fresh out of tomato beers this is hardly the end. I’m happy to report there is an endless array of beers left to bore you with, and, after having braved the perils of Tomato World, let me be the first to say: there’s nowhere to go but up, baby!!

I play in a Diamond Mind baseball league with seven other fellas. Around the house, it has gained no small amount of notoriety as “text baseball.” The links on how I have faired (second worst for two straight years) are over to the left.

There were three young pitchers for the Blue Jays that I wanted to have on my team, because I am a HOMER. When we draft, you always know how they did in the next two seasons. So last year, I drafted Shaun Marcum, Dustin McGowan and Casey Janssen.

They all had terrible 2006 seasons! They were truly terrible. I don’t remember the exact number runs they gave up (in order to keep them, season after season, we have to play them at least 33% of batters they faced in real life) but it was on the order of a million. That gave my team a Pythagorean record of 4-442.

Kidding! The three of them let up 62 runs in 69 innings. But through it all, I knew how the trio fared in 2007 (which we’re going to play after the World Series). Janssen was dominant as a setup guy, and likely moving to the rotation, where he would get a monster amount of innings. Marcum and McGowan were both above average. Couple these guys with Kazmir, Felix Hernandez, Josh Beckett and Gil Meche and I thought I had an outstanding staff.

Meche came back to earth to start the season, but that was fine. Casey Janssen tore his rotator cuff, so he was out for 2008. Marcum was pitching amazingly well, with like a 2.85 ERA when he went on the DL. And Dustin McGowan just tore his rotator cuff as well.

Good thing I gave them all those innings I GUESS.

Did I learn a lesson? Sure – develop one pitcher if you like, over the course of a season, but otherwise it’s just not worth it. We play six games a week for about 14 weeks and it takes about 50 minutes to play a game. That’s a lot of time to invest in “next year.” Well, not so much the time, as the time of the games plus the time picking the keys off the floor and putting them back into a punched-up keyboard.

Thomas M. Disch, author of the 1986 text adventure Amnesia (published by Electronic Arts) passed away on July 4th. He took his own life.

Every May my friend Greg returns to Colorado, and we go out and have a drink or play some Xenophobe or something, and funnily enough, this game came up in our conversation. Amnesia, the game, was the first thing I had ever tried to buy over the Internet.

Back around 1998 someone offered it for sale on one of the newsgroups. I wrote them saying that I would buy it. Everything was agreed upon and I just forgot to, ah, actually send the check. I was “that guy.” I ended up being a more responsible Internet buyer, and got the copy depicted above. You know the big box of computer manuals that every PC gamer has? Yeah, the manual to Amnesia was on top and one of our cats decided to sleep in said box and then scratch it all to make itself cozy. Whoops.

I know that in 2008, having a game that says AMNESIA on the cover is like making a game called MAZES or MY COLLEGE DORMROOM. I don’t quite think it was this terrible cliche, but Amnesia gave you plenty to do – my main gripe with interactive fiction that features amnesia on the part of the protagonist is that it requires an enormous leap of faith to keep playing. Amnesia – Disch’s game – wasn’t like that.

But why it will always be special to me is because it was the first game that I played that seemed “infinite.” Elite did that for people, and Starflight and a few sandbox-style games as well. Amnesia said it had much of Manhattan available. You were wandering around New York City (!!!) in a video game! Sure, it was all text, but we didn’t care!

Of course, later you learn that while much of the city may have been represented, it was not in a meaningful way. You learn about the limitations of computers and further games can’t trick you like that. But for me, Disch’s Amnesia was the one that gave me pause as a kid and wonder about what kind of universes could be created in a floppy disk.

Amnesia had one direct influence on my own IF work. My original plan for Pantomime was to have the entire Phobos colony represented. I wanted the player to be able to go to any door and maybe break it down and explore inside and get sub quests from there. With only a few people left behind on the colony, it would be doable. I ultimately had to scrap it. I left a little bit into it, however – all the hallways and doors are there for the apartment that Raif, the protagonist, lives in. Someday I’ll try to revisit that. Given enough time, I think the dreams that Thomas Disch had for his text game could be a reality.

One last thing. Jason Scott, who is working on a text game documentary, wrote Mr. Disch a while ago to see if he would be available for an interview. The exchange is here. Disch says, “[M]y memory of the particulars of Amnesia are foggy after all this time–and the genre I worked in never took off: interactive fiction, text only. “

And this is sad, to me. I have made so many friends through interactive fiction and had so many good times. I have created things that I am truly proud of, and received the kind of useful criticism that has helped me grow and mature as a writer. But yeah, mostly the friends thing. It’s very sad to me that he didn’t remotely get the same pleasures out of it. I can accept IF being irrelevant to the wide majority of the population, I mean, you have to come to grips with that or you are not living in reality, but to see a very talented individual create the fiction of what was a very playable game and end up with that take on it… that’s depressing.

I hope he found the peace he was looking for. If I can figure out how to play Amnesia in DOSbox or something, I’ll pass this info on. As a PC Booter game, I think those are somewhat difficult to emulate.

UPDATE: I have since learned that Disch was worried about losing his rent-controlled apartment in NYC, as it was in his partner’s name. Speculation is that he ended his own life at least in part due to these circumstances. Whoever the landlord is, whose greed in squeezing some extra money out of a place lived in by a 68-year old man came to light:  way to fucking live up to the cliche, slugger.

I’m on vacation this week, but I am trying to write stuff in advance and set it to publish in the future.

Here is a post I wrote on Caltrops regarding Peter Moore, President of EA Sports, telling us why they aren’t making anything for the PC any more. Amazingly, “because you’ve all wised up to our filth” was sort of glossed over. If you have a comment, please do not hesitate to make it over at Caltrops, registration is not required.

A few years ago I did the vocal, bass and drum tracks to a few new songs, in what would have been the third Beaver compact disc.

It never materialized for a number of reasons – the fact that we lived in four different states didn’t help, but at the same time, it was ultimately going to require someone running around all over the country with a shitty Tascam Portastudio03, recording things. And when I realized that the best recording I was ever going to get out of that goddamn thing was a continually-popping pantomime of listenable…ness..ity, it really made the hundreds of dollars (which I didn’t have) in travel seem like a pointless expense.

Enter the Internet! You can now collaborate on songs across the globe.

Anyway, I am attempting to fix up some bugs in a text game I released 8 years ago. If you can play a reasonable guitar… haha, I am just kidding, you can’t suck more than me – if you can play a guitar poorly, sign up to www.kompoz.com and help me out on this track: http://www.kompoz.com/compose-collaborate/home.project?projectId=5168 . The tough part would then be in naming our band?

As I arrived at the local watering hole this past Saturday night, I found my dear friend, my drinking colleague hunched grotesquely over the bar softly weeping into a half-empty glass of pale yellow beer. He’s not one often moved to tears, so I simply had to ask, “Why so glum?” Maintaining no more than a faint fluttering breath he nonchalantly pointed in the direction of the now warm beer. Picking up the pint glass, I asked, “Was this the beer that made you cry, cry baby?” He nodded slowly, still staring blankly at the wall behind the bar. Well! A beer that makes grown men weep. Figured I might as well see what all the fuss was about. Getting the bartender’s attention, the very same bartender who supplied me with the Short’s Bloody Bar, I put in my order. I’ll have what Weeps is having.

And the hits just keep on coming! Here’s what hit the bar this time:

BEER: Sprecher – Mamma Mia! Pizza Beer

Uh-oh. Another one? Yes! Another one! Fuck, that bartender’s got some axe to grind.

So, goodbye, everyone!! Once more, I’m disappearing into Tomato World.

“Unfiltered American Ale Brewed With Basil, Oregano, Tomato and Garlic.”

Created by Tom and Athena Seefurth of Campton Township, Illinois in his lifelong pursuit to combine two of the world’s great loves, pizza and beer. Some say it’s the best pizza beer around. Feh! If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this… Oh, but I’ll give it a chance, as I’m a real sucker for unique beer it seems.

Hm. Not to brag, but, it’s a Pizza Parade, babies! Hands down, no question, it is pizza-y. That was the aim of Mister and Missus Seefurth and they achieved it. The nose is slathered in spicy, chunky, robust tomato sauce primarily, with just a slight bready background note. This, of course, carries over into the taste. Along the way, other flavors begin to develop — some sweetish dough here, some chiffonade basil there. Even a pinch of red pepper spiciness. Oh, and packed with fresh garlic. Ah, the power of garlic. As with any pie, it’s more of the same till the end, though the spices still had legs and carried on well past the finish. As you drink it down, the various flavors really start to come together as it slowly bakes in your gut, all of it settling vaguely under the definition of “pizza”, at least in terms of flavor and aroma. No complaints here. However, as with Short’s Bloody Beer, I just can’t see myself calling on this beer every day. Not bad at all, though. Easily the best pizza beer on the market.