Psychic Warfare Department

Geek Out

2009-11-09T01:39:15Z

If anyone here plays Dungeons & Dragons Online (it's FREE!) feel free to hang out with me.

Ghallanda - Herwin the Hirsute (Barbarian)
Sarlona - Turkinias of Überwald (Wizard)
Kyber - Jinuro Kurita (Fighter)

Did I mention that it's FREE?

You've got it backwards.

2009-11-07T18:16:54Z

For the hetero ladies ...

Part One: Good Listeners. As others have pointed out before, the only time a man talks about his problems to someone else is when he wants their advice & hints on how to solve them. Men do not believe in talking about their problems to others just for the sake of being heard by someone. Therefore, if you tell a man your problems he is going to go straight into problem solving mode, begin analyzing the problem, and come up with suggestions for fixing them.

Therefore talking to a man about your problems just to get it off your chest is not going to produce the desired result of a shoulder to cry on. It's going to switch him into analytical mode and he'll respond not with sympathy but rather potential solutions. He is anaylzing your problem, processing it in his brain, and spitting out results. This is only possible because he is actually listening to you.

Now since male brains work in compartments, this allows for disparate multitasking. There is also a utility function in the male brain called "Yes Dear" which is pretty handy, too. What this device does is records the last two minutes of what you say for playback and then forgets it forever. This is so that when you pause to quiz him to make sure that he's listening he can fool you into thinking that he really is by playing back bits & pieces of what you just said. The "Yes Dear" function is remarkable in that it only uses about 10% of the male brain to operate, leaving the other 90% to focus on more important issues, such as "Did I leave the gas on? Of course not, I'm a fucking squirrel." Thus the illusion of the wonderful, sensitive guy who really pays attention to everything you say because he just patiently listens to you all the time is, in reality, a dead giveaway that he isn't actually listening to you.

Ergo, if he's really a good listener he's going to annoy you by constantly interrupting you. Otherwise he's just faking it and dreaming about fishing.

Part Two: Older Men. This one is easy. The guy does not have more staying power because of his vast experience & self discipline through years of training. He's just desensitized with age. He's just plain old old and couldn't get off faster if he wanted to. And trust me, at this point he probably would rather get off fast and be done with it because you're no spring chicken, either. A 40 year old virgin is going to last longer than his 15 year old counterpart just from having too many nerve endings rubbed off while rubbing out for the last two decades. It's really that simple. Don't let guys impress you by bragging about a entropic effect of time that just happens to play in their favor for a change.

Optimism

2009-11-06T01:11:51Z

Look on the bright side ... fewer Texans!

"And you get to stay in a swank hotel for free!"

2009-11-03T17:06:58Z

So I am put into a hotel room with this ... person ... for three days ...

I get back from my first shift of the first day and go to take a shower. This notion proved short lived. When I lift up the toilet lid I find that in addition to clearly having not been flushed after recent use, the entire seat is completely soaked in urine. I then began to wonder how much urine had got on the floor but was unable to tell because all seven (7) of the towels the hotel had stocked were now crumpled an on the floor. For the record, this person is not in any way fat. Your guess is as good as mine.

After quickly and violently washing my hands, I look inside the bathtub and instantly regret it. Imagine going to a breakfast diner and ordering country style biscuits and gravy. You know, the gray-lumpy-stuff gravy? Now take the whole plate and pour it into a food processor and set on the lowest speed for about fifteen seconds. Next, pour the sludge into the nozzle of a fire extinguisher and use this to blow this concoction across the bottom of the bathtub until it is completely covered in gray, lumpy sludge.

At this point I washed my hands again, rinsed all my bathroom sundries in hot water and then removed them from the bathroom entirely. I also tossed my toothbrush into the garbage can, just to be safe.

I spent the remainder of my time there completely unshowered and using only public toilets, which unlike my own bathroom, couldn't give me anything worse than, say, hepatitis or syphilis. We also got to enjoy Middle Eastern food from "Famous Hamburgers" (this was no doubt due to the profound lack of Middle Eastern restaurants in Dearborn), along with lots of breakfast sausage, beef chili, lunch meat sandwiches, orange juice, etc. In other words, I pretty much lived off donuts which, now that I think about it, was probably the best part of my stay.

After I got home I took a nice long shower in our own conspicuously clean bathroom, washed all my clothes in our own washer, slept in the comforting comfort of my own futon, and the next day Erik fixed us up a delicious dinner of cheese ravioli which we ate while talking about Things Other Than Anime.

Still it was better than the 2010 convention in downtown Detroit, where one of the security team members got stabbed by a crackhead and two underage girls got raped by off-duty police officers. At least I wasn't there for that one.

nephilimnexus @ 2009-10-26T13:17:00

2009-10-26T17:18:23Z

Hey, I found a really old photo of the F117 Stealth Fighter!

Chill, bitch!

2009-10-25T14:38:50Z

The most important role a father plays in child rearing is hiding the keys to the mother's helicopter once in a while.

It's those trivial little details ...

2009-10-21T13:25:22Z

"Hello,

I am responding to the above mentioned job offer that you have placed on Craigslist. I am interested in this job but would like to know just a little more about your company. If you could be so kind as to reply and include the name of your company it would be greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you,
Von Neely."

That has become my rubber stamp response to pretty much every Craigslist job listing that I see. So far I have probably answered well over a hundred of them over this year. To date I have received a total of two actual responses back, and one of them was from a job scam place that was just fishing for e-mail addresses on Craigslist.

Are these people really so computer illiterate that they don't know how to check their own e-mails after their nephew's post the job listing for them? (Very likely, as I've actually seen this happen)

Are they terrified of the prospect that a potential job seeker might *gasp* learn the super secret location of their place of of business? (Cocaine does do weird things to people, I suppose)

Is there something horrifically wrong with what I'm sending them? I mean, seriously, show me that which is between those quotation marks that offends people so much that they can't be bothered to type out a simple one fucking word response to my of so difficult question? (Because even copying & pasting this into an e-mail, which is a fifteen second task, still requires more effort than answering it)

Or are they really just posting on Craigslist as a legal formality to say that they really tried hard to find someone from the public queue before hiring (pick one) Cousin/Beer Buddy/Frat Brother/The Girl With Big Boobies to fill the job eight seconds after they finish posting their ads? (We have a winner!)

... just a band.

2009-10-19T10:37:53Z

Want!

2009-10-16T05:45:51Z

But was it intentional?

2009-10-15T17:19:55Z

Having read a lot of science fiction in my life, there has been rarely (if ever) a situation where I saw an episode of Star Trek and didn't immediately go "Oh, they ripped this one off from _______, written by ______ back in 19__." Star Trek is, to put it mildly, the biggest plagiarist in the history of science fiction. I doubt that their staff writers ever had a single original idea in their lives. It went from one original idea by Roddenbury, maybe four original ideas by actual sci-fi writers just for that show, and from there on out it was just Cut & Paste from random books pulled off the sci-fi section of the local library.

Yet this is what was actually cool about the series. Up until the invention of Star Trek, sci-fi had it's moment of popularity (especially in the 1950s) but it never really became mainstream. What there was of it in Hollywood invariably revolved around white guys in silver rocketships blasting every non-human & non-caucasian within fifty miles with rayguns to rescue the blond damsel in distress. It was, in other words, no different in it's structure than every other piece of crap that Hollywood was cranking out up until 1960 or so.

So in addition to doing some seriously forward-thinking concepts such as, holy shit, a multi-racial & multi-national crew, letting people know that aliens were people too and not just blasting everything with lasers as the solution to everything, they also did the world of entertainment the service of plagiarizing various sci-fi books en masse.

To this day the average American doesn't read science fiction - at all. Even self-proclaimed sci-fi fans hardly actually open books anymore and instead just watch it on TV so they can enjoy the wonderful world of "Who needs an imagination when you've got CGI?"™ And it's true; Sci-Fi and a sense of imagination obviously don't mix, right?

Along comes Star Trek. By blatantly ripping off every good (and not so good) sci-fi novel they can find, carving out it's plot and fitting it into the lives of a set of characters that just happen to cover all the basic personality archtypes common to sci-fi writing (what a coincidence!) what they are actually doing is creating a Cliff Notes version of the vast libraries of sci-fi out there that can be pleasurably digested by all the weekend geeks who don't have the time or motivation to actually, y'know, read an Asimov or Heinlein novel. By making sci-fi so accessible to anyone with a TV (read: America) they pushed the entire genre into the mainstream of awareness & consciousness of the public. From there more of the mainstream may, just may, have started picking up some of those novels that they wouldn't have before.

So in summary, through plagiarism of sci-fi literature Star Trek actually saved sci-fi literature from it's own obscurity.

Get Rich Quick!

2009-10-14T22:30:26Z

I gots me an idea!

I should open up a little shop in Washington D.C. that sells nothing but two specific kinds of select hardware supplies, namely, torches and pitchforks.

What could possibly go wrong?

... only if you promise to use the power for evil.

2009-10-13T11:08:50Z

I saw a want ad here in Detroit for a psychiatrist. I wonder how hard it would be to bullshit them into giving me that job?

Meanwhile... it's amazing how many responses that I've gotten from sending out my resume this month. All of them, naturally, from job ~~scams~~ "placement servcices" who would love to help me for a "small" fee, and none of them having anything whatsomever to do with the jobs that they falsely advertised for in the first place. Of course, even if you don't answer, you can now still expect another 500+ messages per day in your spam box because now they've got your e-mail address, sucker.

What's even more depressing is that the cornicopia of the universal donkey porn/cheap dick pills/meet local sluts ads that once filled my spam box (and yours) have, themselves, become buried under the avalanche of job scam & buy-a-degree online ads that have now actually displaced raw sleeze in the wonderful world of online desperation advertising.

Maybe I could move to Somalia and become a pirate? I know how to start a lawnmower engine and use an AK-47. What more do I need?

Anyway ... this one is for you, suzyhomewrecker

These are not the droids you're looking for...

2009-10-11T12:23:15Z

So, does anyone here remember back about, oh, seven or eight years ago when I started mentioning that I heard a rumor somewhere that since CGI has become so cheap & easy that someone out there was planning on doing a live action version of AKIRA? Bonus points if you heard the version where they were going have ICP make a cameo as the Clown Gang in the film?

So, do you want to know where I originally heard that rumor from, all those years ago?

Nowhere.

I made the whole fucking thing up.

See, way back then I was sitting around thinking "Wouldn't it be totally cool if they did a live action version of Akira? I mean, CGI is cheap & easy now. I wonder why no one in Hollywood (or Tokyo) has thought of it?" But that didn't sound cool enough. People would just nod their heads and agree with me. But do you know what would sound cool? There were really gonna do it, man! And they'd be all, like, aw naw they ain't! And I'd be all like, aw hells yeah dey iz! And they'd be all, like, dooooode! (Wow that was easy)

So at first I thought of this as just another one of my social experiments, to test people for gullibility. I wanted to see just how long it would take before this rumor that I fabricated entirely out of my own ass came back to me (1 year), followed by it becoming quoted from "reputable sources" in Hollywood (3 years), and how often the "this should have been a complete giveaway that I'm bullshitting you" line about the ICP cameo was included with it (roughly 25% of the time).

Over the years this rumor has mutated very, very little, which was actually unexpected. I figured by now people would be embellishing it with their own favorite actors and alternate endings, etc. Alas, it's stayed surprisingly intact over the years.

Anyway, about, oh, five years in to this now rapidly aging little joke that I was playing on the world I started to think about how Fox News operates and thus did wonder to myself, "You know, if there is one thing that will make Hollywood jump on an idea, any idea, it's the idea that a rival studio may do it first. I wonder what would happen if this rumor of mine ever actually made into the ears of some Hollywood producer or something?"

DANCE MY PUPPETS

Now... I need someone to fetch me a sample of Bruce Campbell saying "Get your paws off me you damn dirty ape!"

I gots me a plan.

Von's belated movie review

2009-10-10T13:26:24Z

I'm not sure if "District 9" is a good portrayal of what aliens might be like, but they definitely got human beings down with 100% accuracy.

Let's see... backstabbing, clueless coworkers - check. Flakey wife who tells him fuck off, she loves him, fuck off, she loves him - check. Government/Corporation (what's the difference these days?) that happily carves up it's own employees for resale parts - check. A stepfather who clearly spends his free time jacking off to old Auschwitz photos - check. An antagonist who said stepfather would be proud to call his pure aryan crotch spawn - check. Childless housewife in denial - check. Media puppetry - check. Innocent guy in jail for blowing the whistle on the rich & powerful - check. Crime syndicate with more clout than the local government - check. Drug pushing - check. Religious whackos carving people up for rituals - check. The most demented sexual perversion I've ever seen suggested in a movie (okay I admit I don't get out much) - check. Oh, and most of all, the "hero," the shining example of the best humanity has to offer, the moral redemption pivot character turns out to such a selfish, two-faced and utterly spineless worm that he makes Gaius Baltar look like Teddy Roosevelt.

"Lookit me, I'm have an ALIEN WALKING TANK!"
"Lookit me, I have a low velocity handgun!"
"EEEEEKKK! I run away! EEEKK EEEKK EEEKK!"
"Hey, come back, you dropped your frilly pink panties!"

Much like Tim Burton's rendition of "Planet of the Apes," this is a clear case of a decent movie that could have been awesome if the director had only hired an actual actor for the job instead of just whoever gave him the best under-the-desk hummer during auditions. And much like "Planet of the Apes" I again say that they should have dumped their leading man in favor of Bruce Campbell. He's a ham, true, but he's got a ton more personality than that lump of wood Mark Wahlburg (PotA), and generally reacts to danger with something more productive than flopping around like a dying fish and squealing like a fifteen year old groupie in a boy band ticket line whilst waiting for his sidekick to save his ass over & over again the way Sharlto Copley does through the whole film (D9).

The movie does get bonus Geek Points for flagrantly ripping off & using the gravity gun from Halflife 2. After all, haven't we all punked some poor guard with a flying cow and/or refrigerator fired at mach two in that game? Isn't that the whole reason we played it? It was a nice touch.

Some plot holes were easy to overlook (like, dude, if you had the tractor beam all along...) but there was one that did drive me nuts: Dude, what kind of dumbass on the run from authority uses their cell phone for anything? Hello, 9/11, internal GPS chips in every cell phone now? We can spot you from orbit the second you turn it on. Heck, you don't even have to turn it on. We can make it turn itself on just to find your ass. And then who does he call? His wife! I kept waiting to see an ion beam streak down from the clouds like the Wrath of Thor and turn him into freeze dried coffee grounds right there. Dumbass dumbass dumbass!

See, this is the problem. Every movie hero should either be really capable but have some kind of weak spot (that villains exploit) or, if generally incapable, have some kind of redeeming quality about them. Such as strong moral character, or a stubborn refusal to give up, or maybe they're just plain smarter than the bad guys. This guy, however, was like Ohio. He got nothin', folks. No morals, no courage, and no brains. Was there supposed to be something to like about this guy? Because I seriously can't find it.

To further rub humanity's nose in the ground (which I have no problem with, natch) was that all the hero traits we hoped to see did, in fact, exist in the movie in the form of his insectoid side-kick who spoke entirely in subtitles. Courage, morality, resourcefulness, honesty... well folks, since we really couldn't find any worthwhile humans anywhere in this movie (which was the most realistic part of the film, of course), we let the bug steal the pedestal... and then shone the spotlight on that guy with the poor bladder control over there, anyway.

Final note for the director: The blood on the camera lens effect starts off as awesome but goes downhill rapidly with every time it gets repeated. Which in this case is about once ever three minutes.

So that's my review. Maybe I'll do another if I actually, y'know, watch another movie or something. And it will, of course, be months after you've all already seen it. I'm hip that way.

Somewhere in America a drunken, wife-beating redneck with an IQ of 50 is making over $100K a year.

2009-10-09T06:52:44Z

... and most likely in Texas.

You'd think that farting directly on the cat's head would make it move, but nooooo.........

I'm now so sick (occificially) that 70 degrees now feels icy cold. Being that I'm not a 5'2" female, this is not normal.

Meanwhile, as if job hunting wasn't futile enough already, now I'm torn between:

A) Staying in bed to recover, thus wasting valuable time that I can't really afford to waste.
B) Try to go to interviews with deviled eggs for eyes and a snot gyser for a nose.

"Does this make me look fat?"

2009-10-07T14:59:40Z

Ayako Miyake just needs an oversized t-shirt that says "Your Girlfriend Sucks."

nephilimnexus @ 2009-10-07T08:24:00

2009-10-07T12:25:58Z

Sometimes you get so sick that you're afraid you might die.

Sometimes you get so sick that you're afraid you might live.

That's what I get for letting a human touch me. Yetch.

nephilimnexus @ 2009-10-06T19:17:00

2009-10-06T23:18:07Z

I'm not a dog guy, but this still made me go "Awwwwwww!"

Who rules Bartertown?

2009-10-06T09:40:32Z

Society is divided into three social classes. First, there is the TOP. Their lives revolve around marrying their own cousins to protect the purity of their portfolios and their precious gene stream. Having inbred themselves to their point of chronic retardation, they survive entirely by the hard work & efforts of the MIDDLE and BOTTOM below them.

Next is the BOTTOM. Their purpose is to flip hamburgers, buy music from WalMart, praise Jebbus and breed like voles. They are also prone to profound levels of ignorance because they are educated entirely by television. A large number are supported entirely by social pacifier checks from the government, the money for which comes almost entirely from the MIDDLE.

The MIDDLE are all those poor saps out there cramming in as much education as possible on the hopes of someday scraping up enough financial security to be able to breed enough units to replace even half their own numbers with each successive generation. Their lives revolve are college, college, and more college so that they can aspire to get as close to the top of the glass ceiling of their social class. Of the three groups, this is the one that ultimately holds all of society together.

Yet despite having all the apparent brain power of the population, the one question this group are apparently not able to ask themselves is why such an awe inspiringly fucked up society should be held together at all?

The problem isn't the people at the top or the people at the bottom. Left to their own devices they would quickly be a self-correcting problem as neither group is really capable of supporting themselves. The problem isn't that the people at the top & bottom are not doing their jobs. The problem is all the hard-working, honest, book cramming pillars of humanity. The problem is the people that are are doing their jobs.

Make Your Own Von Reply

2009-10-06T08:42:50Z

Your problem: A PARTICULAR PERSON

Von's answer:

Your problem: A SMALL GROUP OF PEOPLE

Von's answer:

Your problem: A LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE AND/OR A CITY

Von's answer:

Your problem: THE HUMAN CONDITION

Von's answer:

Your problem: YOUR BOYFRIEND

Von's answer:

Your problem: YOUR GIRLFRIEND

Von's answer:

Your problem: THE JOB THAT YOU ARE LUCKY TO EVEN HAVE IN THIS DAY AND AGE

Von's answer:

Your problem: YOUR HEALTH PROBELMS

Von's answer:

Your problem: THE ROTTEN FRUIT OF YOUR LOINS

Von's answer:

Your problem: YOUR LACK OF A SOCIAL LIFE

Von's answer:

Your problem: ANYTHING POSTED VIA TWITTER

Von's answer:

Your problem: ANYTHING ELSE

Von's answer:

Your problem: AMERICA'S FUTURE

Von's answer:

nephilimnexus @ 2009-10-06T01:53:00

2009-10-06T05:54:02Z

Being in the presence of too many humans for too long has made me sick.

On the plus side, I got to meet Robert Axelrod. Despite the porn-star name, he has actually been a voice actor for many animated movies for longer than the majority of the people at that convention have been sucking down oxygen.

Any anime movies of note, you might ask? Well, there was this one movie he was in...

nephilimnexus @ 2009-09-29T05:41:00

2009-09-29T09:49:00Z

Only Harry Turtledove fans will get this...

2009-09-23T03:58:58Z

Holy shit, isn't that Jake Featherston?

I like rice.

2009-09-19T21:09:42Z

I find Craiglist to be a dark comedy without our failing economy. We've already seen all the job scams and the employers demanding a PhD to flip burgers, but the thing that gets me the most is the this: Craptastic language skills. The advertisements themselves are rife with spelling & grammar errors, with many being barely a step above leetard-speak.

The people (?) who write them fail to mention details in their postings such as, oh, the name of their company or how to contact them with near perfect regularity. The Craigslist E-mail links? They don't work. Or rather, if they do work (which I doubt) then the simians who get their four year old nephews to write these posts for them don't keep those nephews around to actually answer any e-mails they receive. If they don't give a phone number or address then you can't contact them. I'd say about 90%+ of these postings have (you guessed it) no phone number or address listed.

The only thing the beings writing these things seem to be capable of writing about is how they are totally desperate for help right now, so desperate that they're willing to pay a mere MBA a whopping eight bucks an hour to unclog their toilets but only if you have a minimum of seven years of uninterrupted turd expunging experience, own your own house on the right side of Eight Mile and drive a Lexus no more than four years old.

In short, our economy is pretty much controlled by people with an apparent IQ level best suited for banging rocks together. While some may say that I'm exaggerating, I ask those people: Look at your boss and tell me I'm wrong. Look at our nation's economy as a whole. At this point to assume that anyone with a modicum of intelligence is in charge is just a blatant act of denial.

Geography Fail

2009-09-19T00:17:05Z

According to Craigslist, Ann Arbor, Pontiac and Troy are all part of Wayne County. Who knew?

(If these are the people who are managing our businesses, well it certainly helps explain the state of the economy, neh?)