For the more concise version, you needn't do more than look to your right.

What I had hoped for this site to become has offically gone on hold. My current legal and financial situation(s), well, more like situation since they're basically intertwined, has gotten worse and between my lack of funds and new need to focus on job hunting, I can't make working on this my priority anymore. The code for the sites namesake, and my child of a pet-project, is coming along nicely, but for now I need to focus on more urgent needs.

In other news, I added a writing page, where I'll be putting my little blibs and blurbs for all of you to see.

I recently updated myself on the Hans Reiser trial. Turns out he did kill his wife, and worse yet, he pulled what wired.com has dubbed the "geek defense." As I understand it, his entire defense was that he had been staring at a computer too long, though from the over 100 articles that have been written about this trial (no, I have not read all of them), the jury and judge were a little more than amused by it. He's now appealing the decision based on the fact that his lawyer was a pill head and betrayed him.

I hate how these media circuses paint geeks and nerds to be these total freakos when there are plenty of non-geeky, non-nerdy freakos out there who cause a hell of a lot more damage. For example, the NY guy who shot 13 people, or the PA guy who was afraid Obama was going to steal his guns, and ended up shooting three cops. Gamers and computer programmers might be a little socially awkward, but that doesn't mean they're all killers. I'm sure Reiser had his own demons, and cases like this should be taken one at a time, and not be used to paint an entire demographic as monsters.

Speaking of geeks, I was watching Star Trek today. I suppose that sentence speaks for itself. I can't really help liking it: I was raised on that thanks to my parents. What really made that series stick out for me was the fact that it was the polar oppisite of, say, Dune. Dune might be celebrated as one of the best sci-fi books ever, but it's so facsism practually oozes out of the pages the way the yellow sugary stuff oozes out of warm lemon merange pie. It was the kind of thing Heinlien's Starship Troopers parodied, and even though I didn't really care for either the book or the film, it's a good comparison. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry really showed his genius when he didn't really show much of future Earth, and all the viewer knew was that shit was pretty cool and humans didn't need money anymore. It sounds vaguely like the evil S word: socialism, though, that was never directly stated. I dunno, something about that notion that sci-fi can exist without being post-apocolyptic fictional nazi bullshit always stuck with me, and I thought I'd mention it.

Until later.

I got my state refund already. It feels kind of empowering to get earned income credit - nice to know I've actually made some money. Of course I'm still dirt poor but that does not bother me as much as it used to. I feel like if I got rich I'd get lazy and turn into some kind of asshole.

But speaking of money, since I've got such a fat refund coming, I'm thinking of getting an Xbox. Yes, I can finally catch up with all the bratty overpriveledged 12-year-olds on my street in terms of personal propery value. I swear to fucking god kids these days have so much crap, it's worth more than my car. An Xbox seems like the logical choice for a "casual" gamer like myself - all of my friends have Wiis so the few titles I'm actually interested in for that are accessable - and anything on PS3 will most likely be ported to the Xbox, so I can play it without shelling out an extra two-hundred dollars for essentially the same thing. I'm not huge fan of Microsoft but I must say I'm interested in the indie gaming culture that's forming thanks to Xbox Live and XNA. If you are unfamiliar, XNA is a Microsoft-funded game development suite where people who are good in C++ (curse me for learning Java) can program their own stuff and distribute it on Live. Some of the stuff I played with at college was pretty awesome, the running favorite being a title called "In The Pit," a non-visual game, with added bonus points for the silly voice-over.

And speaking of games and gaming, I've come to a kind of sad realization that I have nearly nothing in common with anyone I grew up with anymore. It isn't just the poor thing - while none of my childhood friends are rolling in dough, I end up being the one who opts to keep going in school instead of jumping into a career. And as for interests, that territory has been barren for quite some time. I've stuck with writing, for better or for worse, and writing about stuff other than games, which is all any of them are really concerned with. It isn't that my childhood friends are bad people - I'm lucky as fuck to have had and still have them - but there just isn't that intellectual connexion anymore, and that is sad.

It doesn't help that I have not fully going into the whole internet thing - I'm 26, have been to college, and don't have a Facebook, so people need to go out of their way and email or call me to invite me somewhere (in my defense, if it's really that much of a hassel, fuck off.) I got rid of my MySpace years ago and while there are some rather silly pictures of me still floating around out there on the Interwebs, I don't exist. And these days that makes staying in touch with people pretty damn hard.

But what are you going to do? Everyone has to grow up sometime, and that implies that people can grow apart. It's sad but thats life. And by now it's tme to get the hell over it and move on.

Oh yeah, as far as my projects go, I'm distracted, so fucking sue me. Everyone else is.

Yep. I finally made enough money in one year to partake in the government's big offering of pie to the American people. I get a whole three-hundred big ones included with my tax refund. Hold on, I think I've heard this one before. You know, the story where a nation was going bankrupt and the president needed to shut everyone up so he gave them a chuck of change with their tax refunds? If this sounds at all familiar, either you can't form new memories like that guy in Memento and everything sounds familiar (in that case, get back to looking for John G, lasy asshole), or you remember the same story from a couple years ago. Point being that Obama's latest placaction of the American people is the exact same thing his predecessor did. You know, The One Who Must Not Be Named, the guy who all of us pretentious, enlightened types are suppposed to joke about while we blog on our Macs in Starbucks drinking a shitty, overpriced Iced Coffee? (DISCLAIMER: I do not own a Mac, blog in public, or pay four dollars for coffee.)

It sounds mean but I find the irony quite delicious. And not delicious in that prepared tofu way, more delicious in that lemon merange pie way. I can already feel the well-oiled gears of Obamamania starting to sqeak with the rust of dismay, and while it does not mean things are looking particularly good for me, at least I have the pleasure of being one of the few who can say, "I told you so" when your grandma loses her pension and has to live in a hotel.

No, I will not apologize for that.

Throwing money at things is a solution, and sadly in the current state of things it's the only solution. However, the concession that saving the companies will screw over all of the people who got Obama elected in the first place must be made, and while the documents have been signed for a while, nobody is admitting it. It's like a family not dealing with their drug addict cousin, and when he dies of an overdose, everyone says, "Oh, he was so strong and healthy," at the funeral.

Instead of feeding the junkie, the more intelligent solution is to throw his ass in rehab. Instead of telling companies that they need to stop outsourcing factories and bringing industry back to the 'States, the Obama solution is to create a thousand jobs here and a thousand jobs there, and at the same time let GM can ten thousand folks so they can "show enough fiscal responsibility" to get their slice of the pie. And we good American citizens are expected to take our measly three hundred and quietly look away.

It might sound like I'm being overly critical of Obama, but come right the fuck on. How is General Motors going to help me: a 26 year old college grad who has no interest in working in the auto industry and can't afford one of their crappy cars anyway. Why should a company that's been sinking its country into debt and embarresment (look up Ford factories in Dresden, Germany around 1939 - interesting stuff) for years get anything they want, while an educated citizen who could potentally have a long life of paying taxes and producing for his country get smacked in the face with a meat mallet?

In other news, Pandora is cool.

Being the movie buff that I am, I did not watch the Academy Awards...

Okay, I watched about five minutes of them. But around the time I saw Jack Black and Jennifer Aniston annoucning the winner of best animation, I decided it was time to go. Jack Black is not the kind of person I ever thought would be doing something like that - apparently enough time has passed for everyone to forget about "I want to fuck you slowly." Is Tenacious D even around anymore?

It reminds me of the constant double-standard of television. Take Fox for example. The cable channel runs all of those terrible news shows that preach about how all the sex, violence, people enjoying themselves, opinions and non-Christians on the Devil Box corrupt your children, and then the network Fox channel runs all of the sex, violence, et al. Or how MTV made a show called Banned from MTV, where MTV played music vides banned by MTV on MTV.

I don't like watching award shows for the same reason I don't really read reviews - they both have that vague sense that someone is telling me what I like. And the kind of clout reivews carry is sort of scary. I know people who won't go see a movie or buy a video game unless it gets above a certain score on a given website. I can sort of see that if the website matches your taste and opinions pretty well, but it does limit you from experiencing something just as fun/entertaining that got a very undeserved 3/10. Sales figures do this too, particularly in the game market. Some of my favorite games, such as Beyond Good & Evil, Fatal Frame, or Symphony of the Night did terribly, and they are now considered to be some of the finest, most beloved games in existence. Sure, everything is clearer in hindsight, but that doesn't mean we should all wait until the masses tell us what we like to go out and get it.

The other part of reviews and awards in general is that they're often slighted by the reviewer him or herself, and whoever is paying said reviewer. And with the internet, it is almost impossible to tell if people on Game Spot or Rotten Tomatoes who write their own reviews just really love the game or movie, or if someone is telling them they love it. Does anyone remember the "All I want for Christmas is a PSP" thing? When sony unvelied its new piece of crap do-everything-including-the-second-coming gadget, a blog popped up about this guy's quest to save enough money for his own overpriced slice of PSP pie. The blog got pretty popular pretty quick, which is strange in and of itself, and it was later revealed that the whole thing was an ad campaign at the behest of Sony.

On the rare occasion that I feel I should review something, I try to keep it short and sweet, and to always point out that there are some things which I simply like. It's subjective as hell, but its honest, and with the rush of reviewers trying to justify why you should like what they like - and sometimes being paid for it - I feel it is a merit.

Other news: if anyone is wondering what happened to my web projects, I am taking a break from them. Some personal stuff has come up - stuff that I've put on hold for way too long because of college or whatever - and it needs to be dealt with.

And to end on a sad note, my cat of 14 years Fuzzball passed away last week, after having a stroke. He was the friendliest, laziest and fuzziest cat ever and he will be sorely missed.

Yeah, I know I'm using a Weezer song as an entry title. The way I figure it, I get one emo moment every couple months, and this is.

And as far as things to be emo about go, holy fucking shit Weezer sucks anymore. So much for the band that got me through high school.

Anyhow, progress on my site(s) has slowed to a crawl. They're designed and ready to go up, pending some last minute tweaks, but I'm now faced with two (expected) problems when it comes to running a state-wide site: 1) people have to know about it 2) people need to be into it. It's damn near impossible to sell anything web-based to anyone anymore because so much of the market is eaten up. Imagine making a new search engine and having to compete with Google. I mean, your average American probably doesn't even know what a search engine is anymore - but they know Google. They don't know what the fuck it does or how it works, but it's used. Or imagine making a social site to compete with Facebook.

It's pretty hard to believe that the general concensous is that this country has laws against monopoly. Wait, no it isn't.

I used to read the webcomic Penny Arcade, and one of the comments writer 'Tycho Brahe' made about web culture alwayss stuck with me (in paraphrase) "Want to make a successful webcomic? Start in 1997." It sounds pretentious as shit, and it is, but the guy's point is excellent. I feel like I've missed the boat of web life, and my feverent hatred of social sites and just about anyone who self-identifies themselves as a web geek doesn't help. I still live way back in 1995, before I even owned a computer or had ever seen a fucking website before, and believe that the Internet is a tool, not a way of life.

And speaking of the wonderful Internet, Myspace proudly (which I don't understand how you can be proud of this) announced that it removed 90,000 sex offenders from it's site. Let me say that again, for it sounds almost musical. Myspace removed nine-tee-thoow-sand sex offenders. That means that up until yesterday, there were almost one tenth of a million rapists and pedophiles pouring through the public profiles looking at YOUR twelve year old. And trust me, your little snowflake has a Myspace. And a Facebook. If s/he is artsy probably a Deviant art account, downloads porn on his/her PSP and has probably sent a nude photo to his/her boy/girlfriend. How do I know this? Because I fucking pay attention. Parents.

There'a a line of smiley faces above the text window for this blog software and they're really starting to creep me out. That information doesn't help you at all.

Well, another rant concluded. New topic.

I started playing Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion last week and I must say I'm really enjoying it - and even managed to hang on to a slim thread of maturity and named my character something other than Ugly-Ass Mofo or Balls. I don't get what's up with the contiunation of series nobody has heard of: I wasn't aware there was an Elder Scrolls 1, 2, or 3, even though I played Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind a few years back and hated it. It's the same with Fallout 3 - what happened to Fallout 1 and 2? Or does the three at the end just sound better?

Oblivion basically took everything that sucked about Morrowind and made it better. You actually have a fighting chance against a goblin with an iron knife at the beginning of the game, and don't need a full suit of plate mail and a magical hammer to win in single combat against a rat. The races are all basically the same, and I only say that because any character of any race can do any thing if you increase the right attributes and skills. For example, my Wood Elf can swordfight like an Imperial and sneak like a Kajieet. Kadidit? Kajet? Cat person.

The two biggest improvements over Morrowind are 1) rapid travel. No more looking for those giant fucking bettles to carry you all over the world. And secondly, there's an actual storyline. Morrowind suffered the problem of not having any direction and a dense storyline populated with generic overlong fantasy names that would make Tolkien himself want to punch the writers.

Of course Oblivion has lots of drawbacks. The system by which you interact with computer characters is impossible to understand (though quite amusing when you piss people off.) The difficulty is a bit unbalanced and the only reason the game is difficult at all is because the monsters you fight have eighty billion hit points and can tie your silver sword of frost into a silver ballon doggy and eat it. Plus, for a game that markets itself for giving the player freedom, there is almost none. You basically run from point A to point B and complete one or two objectives, then move on to point C. You can get just about anywhere on the map from square one, but what good is that if there's nothing to do there?

To round it out, that is what I see as the limitation of all technology: freedom. From games to websites, users are just limited. And I suppose what annoys me is that all of this is starting to become normal. Technology is like an insurgency - when the people embrace it, it wins, regardless of the opposition. Now that the majority of consumers accept that Facebook captures a personality and Oblivion or other sandbox games represent AI freedom, there will be less of a drive to improve on such technologies and more of a drive to maintain the status quo and keep the dollars flowing.

tell me who's this funky dude, staring back at me?

My aunt got me an electric razor for christmas. It's a pretty thoughtful gift considering I don't like facial hair and I need to shave about every thirty seconds thanks to my Hungarian lineage. Seriously, facial hair grows on me like mold on a dirty kitchen sink drain - a kitchen sink drain say like YOURS! now get down there and lick it or the mold will get really pissed off and punch you in your sleep! (?) I've always been a bit scared of those things but I figured I'd give it a try and was pleasently surprised. Until a few hours ago when the fucking thing bit me - and yes, by bit me I mean snagged a nose hair. Anyone who has ever gotten curious and pulled one of those things out with a pair of tweezers knows the absolutely unbearable pain that comes with it. This has severely damaged my relationship with the device.

I saw a headline that got me a little depressed: Obama gives American Idol serious competition. As much as I'd like to see our new prez make an ass out of himself, it's pretty sad that it takes the sheer novelty of electing a black president to our racist little nation to put a dent in something as fucking stupid as American Idol. And yes, there, I said it, novelty. With the American media resembling the ebola virus in fucntion - the way it burns itself out - and the amout of buzz about, "Ooooh lookie, black guy," it'll be old news in another week or so.

Seriously, look at the guy's policies. He's pro-war, anti-consumer rights (has a nicer ring to it than "pro-corporate") and his "open and transparent" administration is already sealing shit left and right. About the only difference between him and McCain when it comes to poor bastards of the lower class is that he'll gently sneak up behind you and insert the ram rod into your anus, while McCain will just run you over.

I come down hard on Obama because I know for a fact everyone wating for him to don the shroud of Turin and lead America to the Promised Land will end up just about where the Jews were when Moses tried that trick: lost in the fucking desert. He, and the American public at large, for that matter, refuse to accept that you don't run a nation from the top down and expect to achieve any kind of "social justice." Top down means that the bottom supports the top - little people exist simply to be taxed and support the big people. I don't know about you but I was under the impression that government existed to care for citizens instead of citizens existing to pay government's bills, or else.

Enough of this ranting. I'm going to see if there's any way to inflict pain on inanimate devices.

The Hamster Effect is a term to describe the directorial style of Terry Gilliam (of Monty Python fame.) There was a shot in his film 12 Monkeys which had to be shot over ten times because a hamster would not run in a wheel. Keep in mind the hamster was barely visible in the and damn well off the screen, but Gilliam would not let it go until the lazy rodent pumped it's pudgy little legs. He was a hardass and a perfectionist, and I've realized that in my creative process, I am both a hardass and a perfectionist. The NJNM site is a few days behind schedule thanks to the fact that I cannot settle on a color scheme I am pleased with, nor can get a stupid fucking one-pixel wide line to go where I want it to go. Yes, one mere pixel stands between me and compeleting this thing.

One. Mother. Fucking. Pixel.

And yet I can't just let it go. It throws the entire layout off and anyone with any sense of aesthetics for the web would agree with me. In truth, I am not that great of a web designer. Being colorblind, I tend to stick to dark, underplayed tones, and being tied to the idea of doing everything in Notepad, I lose some of the finer effects that programs like StudioMX can deliver.

What I can say is that the site works - the layout and method of archiving is all functioning, so once I get past my own stupid obession over yellow lines it will be ready for public view.

And on that note, I've never been one to talk about my creative processes. I'm into commentary and interviews, and I remember seeing an interview with comic artist/writer Fred Galliger, owner of the webcomic turned mainstream Mega Toyko. Or Megatokyo. Or Mega-Tokyo. He spoke for damn near an hour about his "creative process" and it was little more than his own special way of whacking off in front of a crowd of admiring fans, the same way rock concert goes line up in hopes to be baptized in a hot stream of Marilyn Manson's urine.. Self-analysis is only so useful because it is human nature not to find fault in ourselves. I have spent little time with myself in regards to my creative processes as a way of avoiding that ego-trip trap. The point I'm trying to make is that I could benefit from some analysis of my design technique, and maybe learn some new page building skills.

Either way, I like what I've made s far, and that about uses up my self-compliment quota for the day.