July 17, 2012

Video games will be death of us all, part II

In the spirit of the founding fathers of the USA, who were slave owning, women oppressing, treasonous men, I would like everyone to remember these facts on this wondrously blazingly hot day in July. One of the founding fathers didn't like the bible very much the way it is written (it hasn't changed a single bit since back then, just ask anyone who goes to a church) he rewrote it, condensing some parts while expanding others, and some things he just plain took out. That is the kind of stock we americans come from. Oooh, we can't forget those that dress up in bedsheets and burn sacred crosses at different times of the year. God bless america. =D

I love my country, but I don't subscribe to the crazy america-can-do-no-wrong-and-never-has-and-never-will point of view.

I'm in graduate school (it's nothing to brag about, just ask anyone that's been) and I even failed three of the four classes I took one semester. Do you know how much effort it takes to actually fail, not just get a low grade, but flat out fail a course? It's not hard, but it does take a lot of effort. That semester my roommate Tyler introduced me to video games, it was 2005 I think. Not that I was hiding in a closet and had no idea they existed. I loved Earthworm Jim, and would love to get a copy of it still to this day. Duke Nukem, another all time classic. I even played Pong, Frogger and Spy vs. Spy on the original Atari (several of my friends had Ataris-not the band, though that would be amusing. 'Hey Tom, what's the strange noise coming from your pocket?' aside: this was back in the day before there were cell phones that could fit in something smaller than a duffel bag. "Oh, it's just by Ataris playing loud again, though not very well..."). I learned that Civilization and Warcraft III were awesome! I also came to find out that that was all I wanted to do. So that was all that I did, all day, every day, for an entire semester. Sure, I broke up with my girlfriend (she was crazy anyway) at the time, failed three classes, and became more of a recluse than before, but was it ever fun!! (those exclamation points mean you have to yell that last phrase, that's what exclamation points mean-this is for my American readers-not that I have something super cool to say, but rather that I'm yelling. Typing ALL IN CAPS!!! has the same effect. Though our government leadership it seems are subscribing more and more to the view that if you are yelling then what you have to say must be really important. I! NEED! TO! EMPTY! MY! BLADDER! N!O!W!! see how cool and important that is?!) After I failed all my classes, terminate my relationship at the time, and cut off all social aspects of my life, I was ready to begin my career as a full blown chemist. The only problem was/is most chemists have figured out how to do well in school while also playing tons of video games. That's something not even graduate school has taught me how to do. I've unfortunately started playing them again.

I have an 'older' computer, and yes it's a macbook (not pro, this was back when you could get something less that 'pro') and yes it has the intel processor, and no it does not take me all day to look at one picture on it from the internet. Thank you Al Gore. Forget Steve Jobs, unless he comes back as a zombie that's be eating bath salts and smoking weed, then you better not forget him. In fact you should do just the oposite, and remember where he is and come back with a shovel so you can beat his head in for convincing the majority of people that it's cool to pay 6 billion times the actual cost of a lousy product that will be outdated in less than a year and that only allows you to use the software he approved. That's the american way to say thank you. I would like to say 'thank you' to a vast number of people. For some reason they won't come near me once the wind changes and they catch a whiff of formaldehyde (yes, I know what it is, literally, if I had a drawy thingy I could make a ball-and-stick picture of it for you, but alas, my magic thumbs have decided to fail me once again-maybe I need to check their batteries) and see the shovel, they won't come anywhere near me. Chickens. The pope is one scary dude, at least the current one. He and Vladimr Putin look an awfully lot a like, though Putin is supposedly younger. I'll even bet Putin has his own little Russian-commander-mobile. Too bad the KGB isn't still around officially, then he could have a KGB-mobile. It would fly, make him coffee, and even put his kids to bed for him. I want a car like that. I'll never get one though. I blew all chances of being elected pope, when...wait...sorry, my lawyer says I'm not allowed to talk about it yet. Which I probably can't talk about the other thing either. Although, if you ever get a chance to go to Murmansk, Russia I highly recommend it (pun intended). Not only do they have their nuclear naval fleet stationed there, but it's also butt-nasty cold. Not that there are many places in Russia that are not butt-nasty cold, at least up north. It is seriously like going back in time though. You can take a train from Moscow or St. Petersburg up there, and it's not too bad. We were the only people travelling on the train when we went. Just don't eat the cookies left on the table. 1) They most certainly are not free (communism is no longer running the show) and 2) they taste worse than Cheerios. That's bad.

Once we got up there though we had to register at our hotel and have our passport stamped. Whenever we went out we had to have our passport on us, and they would check to see if we were registered at a local hotel (kind of like the dog catcher checking to see if your dogs have licenses and all their shots). We went even further north from there, and I loved it. Though it was like going back in time. We were stopped at state borders where heavily armed guards would pull us off the bus and check our passports to make sure we weren't smuggling fresh baked goods. Little did they know, we had just eaten a large loaf of homemade bread and would soon deposit it beyond their quaint little post. Fools! We almost got stuck up North too because the train decided to leave an hour earlier than what we were told, and they weren't sure the next one was actually going to be coming for the next week.

My computer being somewhat old, though I do have OSX 10.6.8, the last update before having to jump to 10.7, which will also soon be obsolete when they come out with 10.8, which they very wel may have already. I stopped keeping track of apple products soon after I bought my computer and realized they're running a racket, and not the good kind that helps you win at tennis either. I can't play the new top-of-the-line computer games (I only have a dual-core CPU and 1GB of ram) so I have started playing the older versions of more popular games out now, and I must say, they are still pretty amazing. Diablo II is my current poison, that and Plants vs. Zombies. Love it! Thankfully I don't have any classes, I'm just supposed to be working on research...they never said what kind...bwahahahaha!! Maybe that's why congress and the senate don't get anything done, they're all too busy playing the latest version of mass effect and frogger? I guess I couldn't blame them that much if that's why they're not getting anything done. I would hate to be hypocrite, or is it hypochondriac? I always get the two confused!!!

No comments: